Teresa Manera
Teresa Manera de Bianco is an Argentine paleontologist and geologist who taught in the geology department at the Universidad Nacional del Sur in Bahía Blanca. Her research focuses on vertebrate paleontology and the study of footprints from the Quaternary period.
Born into a Bahian family of Italian immigrants, she earned a geology degree in 1968 and a PhD in 1972 from the Universidad Nacional del Sur. She spent many years teaching there (1968–2015) and later settled in Punta Alta, where she collected fossils for a local museum.
In October 1986, after a storm, she and her family discovered a three-kilometre stretch of land east of Pehuen Co with a beachside rock platform containing 12,000-year-old footprints from at least 22 species, including the extinct giant sloth Megatherium and glyptodonts (footprints found again at the site in 2016). Manera published this work with Silvia Ramallo and led a student project to make molds and replicas of the footprints.
In 2005, the Buenos Aires government designated the area a provincial geological, paleontological and archaeological reserve. The site was added to a tentative UNESCO World Heritage list in 2012. Manera also discovered the holotype of the extinct turtle Yaminuechelys gasparinii in the La Colonia Formation in 2001 and, in 2014, helped describe an Early Pliocene fish genus, Plesiopercichthys, with the type species Plesiopercichthys dimartinoi, from the Monte Hermoso Formation.
She has written numerous papers, book chapters and books, including the 2008 Yacimiento Paleoicnológico de Pehuen-Có. Her other works include Las huellas de los gigantes and La herencia de Darwin a la paleontología regional. Since 1990 she has been the honorary scientific director of the Carlos Darwin Museum of Natural Sciences in Punta Alta. She received a Rolex Award for Enterprise in 2004 and was named an illustrious citizen of Rosaleña in 2014.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 22:01 (CET).