The Paleontological Park Los Dedos (The Fingers) is a 370-hectare municipal site located in the vicinity of the Bahía Inglesa Beach. It is an outdoor museum founded in 2007, with a tourist trail where you can observe fossils of 70 species, which reveal that the area was a seabed covered by the ocean millions of years ago in the Miocene Period. Among the marine species are the Megalodon, a giant extinct shark that inhabited the coasts about 20 million years ago. Also were founded in the site a specimen of the Pelagornis Chilensis, the world's largest prehistoric bird with 10 million years old.
The park is in the Atacama Region, located south of Caldera and 6 km from the Bahía Inglesa Beach, 76 km northwest of the city of Copiapó and 880 km from Santiago.
From Santiago Copiapó by air, car or bus. By land take Route 5 North that connects Copiapó with Caldera. And by waterway to the Port of Caldera. From Caldera take coastal road C-302 to Las Machas beach.
The area is part of the Bahía Inglesa geological formation and was studied at the end of the 19th century by the British explorer Charles Darwin, who described the presence of giant fossil molluscs during his visit to Chile. In the 1980s, the area began to be explored by the Chilean Nuclear Energy Commission, due to the presence of uranium in its soils. During that survey there was a large amount of fossil remains of marine species, especially whales, seal sharks, penguins and crocodiles. Also this place was endangered because of the interest of local people that extracted the fossils in an illegal practice called "huaqueo" to market them as crafts.
The Caldera Paleontological Museum treasures some of the main paleontological finds of the Atacama Region. But The most import- ant is the deposit of Cerro Ballena, where in 2010 have been found 40 whale individuals with a date between 6 and 9 million years after the expansion of the Route 5 North. The project was done by paleontologists from the University of Chile, the Council of National Moments, the National Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institute of the United State.
Project developed with the support of: