In Peru, a fossil-rich desert faces unruly development

MITRA TAJ

NEW YORK: Millions of years ago, this desert in Peru was a gathering place for fantastical sea creatures: whales that walked, dolphins with walrus faces, sharks with teeth as large as a human face, red-feathered penguins, aquatic sloths.

They reproduced in the gentle waters of a shallow lagoon buffered by hills that still wrap across the landscape today. Eventually, tectonic shifts lifted the land from the sea. More than 10,000 years ago, people arrived.

With them came art, religion and monumental architecture. Researchers have pieced together these snapshots of the distant past from the bones and tombs found scattered in the Pisco Basin, a thick layer of fossil-rich sediment that stretches across 200 square miles of badlands and riparian corridors between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific coast of southern Peru.

Discoveries from the region have come at a brisk pace in recent decades, with at least 55 new species of marine vertebrates found so far. In August, paleontologists unveiled what may be the region’s most remarkable find yet: Perucetus colossus, a manatee-like whale now considered the heaviest animal known to have existed.

“There seems to be always something new coming from Peru,” said Nicholas Pyenson, a paleontologist and curator of marine mammal fossils at the Smithsonian Institution. It’s not just the abundance of fossils that makes the region special, he said:

“In many cases they reflect species we see nowhere else, and we don’t really know why.” But paleontologists in Peru warn that this unique bounty of bones is under threat from one of the more insidious ways the country loses its natural and cultural heritage: unplanned development.

In the farm town of Ocucaje, the gateway to the Pisco Basin, the desert is quickly being carved into plots of land for real estate projects, squatter settlements and chicken farms.

New roads cut into windswept swaths of desert and sand dunes. Along them, mud barriers and posts strung with barbed wire have gone up.

“We’re being dissected,” said Laura Pena, Ocucaje’s mayor, as she inspected rectangular demarcations in the sand on the outskirts of town. “This used to be an open pampa. There were no roads before. There was just the land. In the last few years, it’s all been fenced off.”

It has happened so rapidly, Pena said, that she is still trying to sort out who owns what and how much of it is legal. Like many small-town mayors, Pena has no land-tenure map of her district and struggles to track decisions made by the provincial and regional governments. Many of the subdivisions contain fossils or pre-Columbian sites that should have been declared off-limits years ago, she said.

Unruly growth has long been a challenge to preserving Peru’s countless ancient ruins, especially along the arid coast, where pre-Columbian civilizations once flourished in the river valleys occupied by Peruvians today.

Because of Peru’s huge housing deficit, neighbourhoods tend to be built first and legalized later. In the past 15 years, 90 percent of urban development has happened informally or outside of regulations, said Andres Devoto, a lawyer.

As available land has dwindled in the arid region between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean — where most of Peru’s population and economic activity is concentrated — speculation has spurred settlement claims in increasingly unlikely areas.