Ameghino was born on September 19, 1853, in Tessi, an hamlet of
Moneglia, a municipality of
Liguria in
Italy, in what was then the
Kingdom of Sardinia and moved to Argentina with his parents when he was 18 months old. Ameghino was a self-taught naturalist, and focused his study on the lands of the southern
Pampas. He formed one of the largest collections of
fossils of the world at the time, which served him as base for numerous geological and paleontological studies. Ameghino was a leading pioneer in the development of
phylogenetics and of the
paleontological approach of
evolutionary biology. He also investigated the possible presence of
prehistoric man in the Pampas and made several controversial claims about human origins in South America.
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, president of Argentina 1868–1874, described Ameghino as "a countryman from Mercedes that nobody knows of here, but that is admired by scholars worldwide." The
Antiquity of Man in the Río de la Plata, later translated into French, was published in 1878.
Phylogeny, published in 1884, was a theoretical work on developing an evolutionary concept in the
Lamarckian vein, and led to the establishment of
zoological taxonomy as a discipline with mathematical foundations. He later directed the Department of Zoology at the
National University of Córdoba, which awarded him with an
honorary doctorate, and was inducted into the
National Academy of Sciences of Argentina. Ameghino worked with
Francisco P. Moreno, founder and director of the
La Plata Museum, as deputy director, secretary, and director of the Paleontology Department upon its establishment in 1888. Ameghino enriched his department with his own collection, which he sold to the provincial government for the purpose. But it was little time in which these two scientists worked together. A year later his magnum opus appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
Mammalian Fossils in the Argentine Republic, comprising 1028 pages and an atlas. This latter contribution to the knowledge of the fossil mammals of Argentina won the bronze medal at the
Exposition Universelle of 1889 in
Paris. He later served as director of the
Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum, in Buenos Aires, and in 1906 published
Sedimentary Formations of the Cretaceous and Tertiary Eras in Patagonia, a work of synthesis is not limited to descriptions, but it raises hypotheses about the evolution of various mammals and analyzes the different layers of the crust and their possible ages. Ameghino returned between 1907 and 1911 to his earlier dedication:
anthropology, the descriptions of the first inhabitants, industries and cultures. He theorized about the coexistence between human beings and the extinct megafauna in the Pampas, including the possible origin of humans and subsequent evolution in America. As an autodidact, he studied the lands of the Pampa, collecting numerous fossils, on which he based himself to carry out numerous geology and paleontology investigations. He also investigated Quaternary man at the Chelles archaeological site. Florentino Ameghino died in La Plata, at the age of 57, on August 6, 1911, after falling ill with diabetes and resisting surgery. ==Oeuvre==