Teresa Manera
Argentine paleontologist
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Through Quaternary, Sedimentary rock and UNESCO
Early life and education
Teresa Manera was born into a Bahian family of Italian immigrants. She studied at the Universidad Nacional del Sur, earning a degree in geological sciences in 1968 and a PhD in geology in 1972.
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Career and research
Manera spent much of her career as a professor of paleontology in the Department of Geology of the Universidad Nacional del Sur in Bahía Blanca. She worked at the university from 1968 to 2015, starting out as a teaching assistant. Manera conducts research on vertebrate paleontology and topics related to vertebrate footprints and remains from the Quaternary period.
Manera settled in Punta Alta, where she began collecting fossils for a museum. Following a storm in October 1986, she and her family discovered a three-kilometre stretch of land east of Pehuen Co with a sedimentary rock platform near the beach containing 12,000-year-old fossilized footprints of at least 22 distinct species, including large mammals such as the extinct sloth Megatherium as well as Macrauchenia, mastodons, and bears. Footprints of Glyptodonts were discovered at the site in 2016.
Following the discovery, Manera published a paper with fellow UNS academic Silvia Ramallo. She led a project with students from the Universidad Nacional del Sur to create molds and replicas of the fossilized footprints.
A 2005 bill to make the archeological site a natural reserve was approved by the Government of Buenos Aires. Through Law Nº 13.394, the site was declared the Pehuen Co-Monte Hermoso Provincial Geological, Paleontological and Archaeological Reserve. The site was added to a tentative UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites in 2012.
Manera discovered the holotype of the extinct turtle species Yaminuechelys gasparinii in the La Colonia Formation in 2001. In 2014, Manera was part of a team that described the Early Pliocene fossil fish genus Plesiopercichthys after discovering its type species, Plesiopercichthys dimartinoi, in the Monte Hermoso Formation.
Manera is the author of numerous research papers, book chapters and books. She authored the 2008 book Yacimiento Paleoicnológico de Pehuen-Có. Un patrimonio natural en peligro. Her books Las huellas de los gigantes and La herencia de Darwin a la paleantología regional were published by EdiUNS.