Millions of years ago, this desert in Peru was a gathering place for fantastic sea creatures: walking whales, dolphins with walrus faces, sharks with teeth as big as a human face, red-feathered penguins, water sloths.
They bred in the gentle waters of a shallow lagoon, buffered by hills that still dot the landscape today. Ultimately, tectonic shifts lifted the land from the sea. Humans arrived more than 10,000 years ago. With them came art, religion and monumental architecture.
Researchers pieced together these snapshots of the distant past from the bones and graves found scattered in the Pisco Basin, a thick layer of fossil-rich sediment that stretches across 320 square kilometers of badlands and riparian corridors between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific coast of southern Peru.
Discoveries from the region have occurred at a rapid pace in recent decades, with at least 55 new species of marine vertebrates found to date. In August, paleontologists unveiled perhaps the region’s most remarkable find yet: Perucetus colossus, a manatee-like whale now believed to be the heaviest animal known to have existed.
“There always seems to be something new coming out of Peru,” says Nicholas Pyenson, a paleontologist and curator of marine mammal fossils at the Smithsonian Institution. It’s not just the abundance of fossils that makes the region special, he said: “In many cases they reflect species that we don’t see anywhere else, and we don’t really know why.”
But paleontologists in Peru warn that this unique abundance of bones is threatened by one of the most insidious ways the country is losing its natural and cultural heritage: unplanned development.
In the farming town of Ocucaje, the gateway to the Pisco Basin, the desert is quickly being carved into swaths of land for real estate projects, slums and chicken farms. New roads cut through windswept stretches of desert and sand dunes. Mud barriers and barbed wire posts have been erected along them.
“We are being dissected,” said Laura Peña, the mayor of Ocucaje, as she inspected rectangular demarcations in the sand on the outskirts of the city. “This used to be an open pampa. There used to be no roads. There was only land. Everything has been closed off in recent years.”
It happened so quickly, Ms. Peña said, that she is still trying to figure out who owns what and how much of it is legal. Like many small-town mayors, Ms. Peña does not have a land ownership map of her district and struggles to follow the decisions of provincial and regional governments.
Many of the subdivisions contain fossils or pre-Columbian sites that should have been declared off-limits years ago, she said.
Unruly growth has long been a challenge to the preservation of Peru’s countless ancient ruins, especially along the arid coast, where pre-Columbian civilizations once flourished in the river valleys inhabited by Peruvians today.
In Ocucaje, Manuel Uchuya, 73, lives in a squatter community atop a ceremonial center of pre-Columbian Paracas culture. More than a century ago, German archaeologist Max Uhle unearthed several mummies at the site that were at least 1,000 years old and packaged in elaborate funerary bundles, including one with a snake motif and a headdress made of macaw feathers.
“We had nowhere else to go,” Mr Uchuya said.
The property had already been ransacked by looters when he and his wife built a cabin on a small plot of land to live on about 20 years ago, he said. Around the corner from their small hut, the remains of a pre-Columbian mud wall still stood, and shards of ceramics, corn cobs, and bits of reddish textiles lay strewn across the ground.
Due to the enormous housing shortage in Peru, neighborhoods are often built first and legalized later. Over the past 15 years, 90 percent of urban development has occurred informally or outside regulations, says Andres Devoto, a lawyer.
As available land has shrunk in the arid region between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean – where most of Peru’s population and economic activity is concentrated – speculation has led to claims for settlements in increasingly unlikely areas.
Ocucaje, a remote outpost in southern Peru’s booming agricultural export region of Ica, has fewer than 5,000 residents, no sanitation and an annual budget for public works projects of about $30,000. Older residents once worked unpaid on the hacienda there until land reforms took place in 1969. Today, most people grow crops, harvest seaweed on nearby beaches, or work as laborers in cities.
In Ocucaje’s main square, children play with a sculpture of Megalodon, a shark three times the size of the great white shark, and a paleontology museum shows fossils to the occasional tourist.
Mario Urbina Schmitt, a paleontologist based in the capital Lima who has emerged as Peru’s most prolific fossil hunter, said he was shocked when he returned to work in the region in 2021 after the Covid-19 pandemic . While many Peruvians Spending the year under strict lockdowns, land claims and squatter settlements exploded. “It’s like going to the Grand Canyon,” said Mr. Urbina Schmitt, “and suddenly there are signs everywhere saying, ‘This is mine!’”
Archaeologists know Ocucaje as a crossroads of ancient civilizations – a place where the Paracas and Nazca peoples created figures of animals and warriors on hills and the Incas built a path to connect the region to their empire.
Paleontologists consider the region one of the best places in the world to study the evolution of marine animals. The virtual absence of rainfall – Ocucaje receives an average of one millimeter per year – has even preserved the red color in the feathers of the five-foot-tall Inkayacu penguin and the hair-like filters in the mouths of whales.
“In terms of the extent of its abundance, it is not a UNESCO World Heritage Site,” said Dr. Pyenson, comparing the area to Wadi al-Hitan, a celebrated marine fossil site in Egypt. “It’s like having a Wadi al-Hitan with many different time periods.”
Mr. Urbina Schmitt said that even after forty years of exploring the Ocucaje desert, he still finds so many fossils that he can afford to be picky. “Anyone can find a normal whale,” he said. ‘They’re everywhere. I don’t count those. I want the new one. The stranger.”
Ten years ago he saw a huge Perucetus vertebra embedded in the side of a cliff. The revelation of the new species, published last month in a paper he co-authored in Nature, is widely celebrated in Peru.
At the Natural History Museum in Lima, where vertebrae and part of the pelvis of Perucetus are on display, visitors line up to take selfies with Mr. Urbina Schmitt. “It’s like we won the World Cup,” he said.
Peruvian paleontologists hope the excitement will translate into more support for their underfunded field and their efforts to protect Ocucaje.
Government officials in Peru have been talking about building some kind of park in Ocucaje for at least a decade. The idea barely came to fruition, partly because of a dispute over which state institution should take charge.
The Geological, Mining and Metallurgical Institute, an agency within the Ministry of Energy and Mines, stripped the Ministry of Culture of fossil protection oversight authority in 2021. But it is still examining which areas should be declared off-limits and plans to rewrite Peru’s proposal. add the region to the UNESCO World Heritage List, says César Chacaltana, director of paleontology.
In the meantime, at least four real estate projects are advertising plots of land to build suburban-style homes in the Ocucaje desert. Videos on social media cite the discovery of Perucetus as a reason to invest in the region. Another promotes quad biking in the desert.
No one has applied for a permit to certify, before breaking ground, that there are no fossil remains on their properties, as required by law since 2021, Mr. Chacaltana said.
It appears that heavy machinery has already leveled the ground in some defined areas and taken any fossils with it. “Any evidence on the surface would have been destroyed,” Ali Altamirano, a paleontologist at the institute, said during a visit.
Ms Peña, who took office in January, suspects that at least some of the newly demarcated areas in Ocucaje are the work of land traders – mafias who organize squatter occupations to appropriate public lands. “We don’t know what they want in Ocucaje,” she said. ‘There’s no water here. We only get water for a few hours once a week.”
Under Peruvian laws aimed at protecting the landless poor, squatters cannot easily be evicted from vacant public lands and can ultimately petition authorities for property titles and public services.
But criminal groups are increasingly abusing these guarantees. They can pay people to build shacks on vacant lots and claim land titles that they can later sell or reuse, or they can use force or bribes to get approval from local officials. “Land trafficking is one of the most lucrative activities for the mafia in Peru,” Mr Devoto said.
Some gated areas in Ocucaje show only the faintest signs of habitation. Near Cerro Blanco, where faded signs mark groups of whale fossils for visitors, a one-room brick house sits in the sun, without access to water or any indication that anyone lives there. “We never see anyone in there,” says Elvis Ormeño, a local guide. “This was not created by a family in need.”
The wind rushing through the desert dunes still hides and reveals clues about the ancient past; it takes trained eyes to see them. Paleontologists and archaeologists fear that uncontrolled development in Ocucaje could destroy potentially valuable finds before they are known.
“You can stand there day in and day out, doing your job, and not see a geoglyph because of the way the sun hits the landscape,” says Lisa DeLeonardis, an art historian at Johns Hopkins University. “And then when you do that, the rocks all line up and you realize, oh, there’s a geoglyph.”
Geoglyphs – large-scale designs made by scraping the ground or lining up rocks – were once created only by the Nazca civilization, whose famous figures extend some 50 miles north of the desert. But earlier geoglyphs of the Paracas are increasingly being found on slopes in Ocucaje and nearby valleys, said Dr. DeLeonardis.
One resident, Mirtha Mendocilla, 28, recalled taking her son and his friends to see a geoglyph that locals had spotted not far from town – only to be confronted by fences and a sign saying the text ‘Private property’.
“What private property?” Mrs. Mendocilla said. “This is our heritage. We have to take it back before it breaks.”
