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A. Hrdlicka wrote (1912, p. 346): “some time in the [eighteen] eighties (the exact date is not known), an employee of the Museo de La Plata made for that institution at Monte Hermoso a collection of fossils. Among these bones was found at the museum a humanlike atlas of subaverage size.”

“When this atlas was seen by Señor Moreno, at that time the director of the La Plata Museum,” wrote Hrdlicka (1912, p. 346), “it was still partially enveloped in yellowish or yellowish-brown earth.” The Montehermosan is a yellow-brown loess. There are no other beds of that color at Monte Hermoso, according to a detailed description of the site stratigraphy compiled by geologist Bailey Willis (Hrdlicka 1912, p. 362). As previously mentioned (Section 5.1.1), the Montehermosan dates back about 3–5 million years before the present, and belongs to the Early Pliocene (Marshall et al. 1982).

In a footnote, Hrdlicka (1912, p. 346) added: “Ameghino (Tetraprothomo, etc., p. 174) says that the specimen was ‘still in a portion of the rock’ but Señor Moreno expressly stated to the writer that it was in ‘earth’ which held together but was not solidified. Whether or not this earth was sandy can not now be definitely determined. The fact that later the bone was cleanly disengaged from the mass shows further that it could not have been in ‘rock.’ Roth speaks of the bone as having been enveloped in ‘loess’ (in Lehmann-Nitsche, Nouvelles recherches, etc., p. 386).” The Montehermosan is the only loess formation at Monte Hermoso (Hrdlicka 1912, p. 362).

Hrdlicka (1912, pp. 346–347) then traced the further history of the atlas: “Soon after its discovery the specimen was forgotten and lay unnoticed in the collections of the museum for many years, until finally it was observed accidentally by Santiago Roth, who freed it from the ‘loess,’ and seeing that the specimen appeared to be a human atlas of small size transferred it to the anthropologic collections of the institution. There again it lay for several years longer without receiving any special consideration, until a new discovery at Monte Hermoso attracted to it the attention of Ameghino. Through Lehmann-Nitsche Ameghino borrowed the specimen, studied it in detail, and published a description of it in his memoir on the Tetraprothomo, identifying the bone with that particular hypothetic genus of man’s precursors. At the same time a study of the atlas was undertaken and published by Lehmann-Nitsche, who in turn attributed it to ‘a Tertiary primate of Monte Hermoso, the Homo neogaeus.’” It may be noted that the Gibraltar skull lay for many years in the garrison museum before it was recognized as a Neanderthal specimen. Also, several Homo erectus femurs from Java were shipped to Holland in boxes of bones. They went unrecognized and uncataloged for several decades after they were unearthed, but are now listed in textbooks with other accepted finds. The number of similar cases could be expanded, the point being that scientists have become aware of many fully accepted fossil finds in the same way as the Monte Hermoso atlas.

At a later date, another bone turned up. Hrdlicka (1912, p. 347) wrote: “Sometime during the early years of the present century Carlos Ameghino discovered in the same barranca of Monte Hermoso a peculiar bone, which eventually was referred to a supposed ancient parental form of man. It was a portion of the fossil femur of a being which F. Ameghino identified as a very ancient forerunner of man, the Tetraprothomo argentinus.”

Hrdlicka felt the femur belonged to something other than a human being. Hrdlicka (1912, p. 376) wrote: “The femur of the Tetraprothomo bears only a slight resemblance to that of man or the anthropoid apes, and but little greater to that of the lower monkeys. It presents no feature which would make obligatory or even possible its inclusion in the Primate class, but on the other hand it shows many features which approximate it to a distant family of mammals. The class of mammals with which the