The La Venta fauna
Colombian badlands preserve the richest tropical fossil assemblage in South America.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 1.7 million years
- Known to
- ± 500 thousand years
- Era
- Miocene, Cenozoic
La Venta, in the Magdalena valley, records a middle Miocene tropical ecosystem with monkeys, giant caimans, terror birds, marsupial carnivores, sloths, rodents and the earliest well-known New World monkey skulls. It is one of very few windows onto tropical rather than temperate South America, which matters because the tropics hold most of the continent's diversity and almost none of its fossil record.