A conversation with Dr. Luis Chiappe. Excerpted from an audio interview, December 1998.

Why Patagonia?

Well, first of all, I'm an Argentine. I've worked in Patagonia for many, many years and I know it well. I know the people, the culture, and how to get things. I've been doing research in Argentina for many years, and I'll keep doing it.

Second, Patagonia is one of the richest places on Earth to find dinosaurs.

And third, because Patagonia is largely unexplored, there are more chances to make new discoveries. I knew that this precise site, this area that we called Auca Mahuevo, a large area of hundreds of square miles, had not previously been explored by paleontologists. So it was virgin territory. That's always interesting because nobody has ever been there. You can figure that maybe you'll find something really good. A treasure. And that's what happened.

We went to Patagonia with the intention of looking for fossils of early birds and their ancestors. These had been found at a site maybe 100 miles or so from Auca Mahuida, on rock layers of a comparable age to those exposed in Auca Mahuida. I figured that if they were found a hundred miles away in the same horizon, going to a place with the same type of rocks that had not been explored (Auca Mahuida) was worth doing. So as I said, it didn't prove to be what we expected, but after we found this place (Auca Mahuevo) on the second day, we didn't invest much time in looking for early birds and their dinosaurian ancestors. We concentrated our efforts on this site.

We're going back in March [of 1999] to do more work on this site and explore further.