DÁMASO ANTONIO LARRAÑAGA AND THE VERTEBRATE PALEONTOLOGY IN THE RÍO DE LA PLATA IN THE EARLY 19TH CENTURY

Dámaso Antonio Larrañaga was born in 1771 in Montevideo, a city that, by those years, integrated the territories of the Virreinato del Perú, and died in 1848 in the same city, current capital city of República Oriental del Uruguay. Until his death, the natural sciences played a fundamental role in his daily activities and were  marked by his religious vocation and his participation in the complex struggle for the independence of South America and Uruguay. As a man of science, he studied botanical, geological, paleontological, zoological, linguistic, and ethnolinguistic topics, under different perspectives related to taxonomy, classification, anatomy, stratigraphy, herbalism, and native lexicography, among others. Parts of his work, manuscripts and drawings, were extensively published during the second decade of the 20th century. A small note of his authorship was included in the second edition of the work entitled Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupeds by Georges Cuvier, published in 1823. Its content had a strong impact on the international scientific community because he included Megatherium as a subgenus of the armadillo Dasypus, postulating that this large mammal had an external armor. In this contribution, we analyze the work of Larrañaga and recreate the scientific context in which Megatherium was inscribed as an armored mammal. As a result, we intend to associate this inference in the diverse postulates concerning the classification of mammals, which, at that time, were based on dental structures, as well as the influence exerted by the interaction between prominent naturalists of the 19th century.