Nicola Descalzi and South American fossil mammals: a transatlantic history connecting Buenos Aires, London, and Mineralogical Museum of Turin University

Early in the 1850s, the Mineralogical Museum of Turin University received two shipments from Buenos Aires, which contained some of the first specimens of megatheres and glyptodonts to be mounted and displayed in Europe. The first part of this article, which is based on archival research as well as on secondary sources, refers to the actors connected with the exhumation of the skeletons, in particular to the Genoese Nicola Descalzi (1801-1857) and the Neapolitan Pietro de Angelis (1784- 1859). Since the1820s they had both lived in Buenos Aires, where they tried to become providers of data, maps, artefacts, and museum specimens for European collectors and collections. Descalzi exhumed and arranged the bones of an extinct mammal that he called Mulita elefantina, the specimen that arrived in Turin in 1852 and on which, in 1839, Richard Owen had created the new genus Glyptodon after a sketch and a tooth sent from Buenos Aires. The second part of the paper, by referring to the debates about the anatomy and mode of life of the South American megafauna, discusses how Eugenio Sismonda, in charge of Turin’s mineralogical collections, reflected those debates in the process of mounting the Megatherium skeleton, an arrangement that was later lost with the bombing of the museum during the Second World War. This paper discusses the role of the Turin glyptodont specimen in the comparative anatomy of those years, showing events that co-occurred in various parts of the world.