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Historical fossil localities are frequently lost because, among other factors, the outcrops have been actively mined or erased by urban development. It would be what happened with historical fossil localities from the old Valparaiso province, in which naturalists, such as C. Darwin, J. Dana, R. Philippi and J. Brüggen collected fossil specimens. Ba...
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... wood began to be studied as a subject of study by itself when Robert Hooke started to observe fossil wood structures using a primitive microscope for the first time in 1665, comparing it with cork cells (tracheids), noticing striking similarities between petrified and living wood ( Figure 1). ...
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... of them were only named as Valparaíso, and that could mean sometimes the hamlets of Placilla/Curau- ma and Algarrobo as well, whose inhabited hamlets where part of some large hacienda. Therefore, in order to find the old locations with geographic coordinates, it should be located using surveying records from the XIX century ( Figure 10) like those mapped and plotted by Pissis (1854). ...
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... After the independence in 1818, this city port grew demographically fast during most of the XIX century covering with buildings any available flatland (El Plan) around 1838 ( Figure 11) and starting to build houses on the hills a few years later reaching a built surface area of 800 Ha around 1900s (Risopatrón, 1924). A more recent assessment of the built urban area of the city adds over 3000 Ha (CONAF-CONAMA, 1999). ...
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... the historical urban development of Valparaiso has obliterated any suitable sedimentary outcrops recorded by Darwin (1834-5), Alison (in Darwin, 1835) and Dana (1838) in the higher ground around Playa Ancha covering any outcrops in the area ( Gana et al., 1996). Most that it was left today is found on the slopes cuts around the old road to Santiago on La Virgen Hill (Campos, 2017) and Ramaditas Hill ( Grimme and Alvarez, 1964), where cuts still are visible on some slopes on the hill (Figure 12). ...
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... the beginning of the XX century, Placilla was still a small hamlet with 320 inhabitants dispersed on 2 km on both sides of the Valparaiso road (Espinoza, 1903), that only in the last 30 years has been growing fast to reach 39344 inhabitants (INE, 2017) in an area of 1377 Ha obliterating any historical outcrops by urban development ( Figure 13). Placilla de Peñuelas was until 1864 a large farm ("hacienda") and stage coach station ("posada") visited by Darwin on his way to Santiago in March of 1835, and not much had changed when it was visited by Philippi around 1870. ...
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... described some of these fossils in 1887 in his monography on Tertiary fossils commenting on finding outcrops bordering the sea shore on 4 to 5 km and 40 feet wide (Philippi, 1887: 10). Later in 1915, Brüggen mapped the area distinguishing two beds (Figure 14), an underlying Cretaceous bed and another Eocene bed on top divided by an unconformity seen on the coastal outcrops above a beach area. ...
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... the other hand, recent changes have occurred because the coast around Algarrobo have been affected by more extreme stormy events since 2015 (Figure 15), with recurrent swells that have increased between 10% and 25% compared to previous years, causing the interruption of the annual dynamic process of the beaches accentuated by anthropic interventions that promote coastal degradation (Briceño et al., 2021). This dynamics has been characterized assessing 6 local sedimentological profiles on a 4 km beach shore on the northern part of this bay (<1.5 km from outcropping fossils) measuring which part of the beaches and at what time of year there is a higher risk of severe erosion in the immediate areas (Briceño et al., 2021;Briceño, 2022). ...
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... the National Museum (Museo Nacional de Historia Natural) at Santiago, we have four local museums where fossil wood specimens are in deposit: the Museo de Historia Natural de Valparaiso (MHNV) whose published catalogue counts fossil plants but not petrified wood (Fuentes, 2019;Campos, 2017), 57 fragments from Museo Fonck (MF), 10 fragments from the Museo Histórico de Placilla (MHPL), and 18 from the Museo del Seminario de Valparaíso (MSV) who have some fossil wood collections ( Figure 16) that have been taken into account to discover their origin using an historiographical approach. ...
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... are many world examples where land development and urban expansion can have large impacts on geodiversity as it has been observed by the danger of destruction of fossiliferous outcrops such as examples given as by industrial and road development in the Gingko Petrified Forest State Park at Washington State (Gray, 2004), or by the urbanization pressure at Maadi petrified forest that covered an large area of thousands Ha, now being partially decimated (40%) and accelerated its destruction by urbanization by New Cairo (AbdelMaksoud and El Metwaly, 2020), with a remaining 70 Ha being preserved as a park surrounded by the growing Cairo megalopolis in Egypt (Figure 17). ...
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... the beach exposes tree stumps in life position originally buried by a lahar (Klohn, 1976) exposed after the world´s largest magnitude earthquake ever registered uplifted the area (ValdiviaConcepción in 1960). The site is severely degraded by unregulated tourists visiting the site, plus erosion associated with the impact of waves and stones moving inside the stumps (Figure 18), besides the intensive bioactivity of a high diversity of algae and invertebrate epibionts eroding the surface (personal observation, LPB). The number of stumps and lost information is difficult to precise due to tides in the inundated area. ...
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... some of it ended up in the local museum of Villa Ortega and the historical collection of the Regional Museum of Aysén (see Ortiz, 2022). Even though, accessibility is limited, in recent years, "El Rosado" (Figure 19) growing popularity with visitors has increased the risk of disappearing before minimal research is done (Avendaño, 2022;Guajardo, 2022;Pérez- Barría et al., 2022). Examples from Chile and across the world are a reminder about what has occurred with fossiliferous outcrops even when fossils are officially protected by law like in Chile (Law 17288), as equally may have additional preservation issues because they are very fragile to anthropic pressure. ...