At first glance, the nameless bakery is no different from the other shops on the slopes of the port of Marechal Thaumaturgo (AC). But just go through the door of the wooden house to come face to face with mastodons, giant sloths and the biggest alligator that ever lived on Earth.
The fossils of these animals are on shelves on the wall next to the entrance. Before picking up his bagel, the customer goes through a 1.35 meter sloth rib, a 3.6 kg mastodon molar (a relative of the elephant) and large FORurussaurusan alligator weighing up to 10 tons extinct 5 million years ago.
These are samples from the treasure of the bakery’s owner, retired police officer Renato Mota, who has been collecting fossils since he moved to the city 40 years ago.
The amateur paleontologist estimates that he has 150 pieces, all found in the region, on the beaches of the Juruá River and its tributaries. The largest of these, kept in his home upstairs from the bakery, is the 32-kilogram shoulder blade of a giant sloth.
At 81 years old, walking slowly, Mota doesn’t even need to go after the bones anymore. Known to everyone in the city of 20,000, now it’s the locals who bring what they find to him.
“Today they brought me this bone from a giant sloth. This part is from the shin with the foot,” he says, holding up the new fossil. “They were bathing in the São João River and they found it.”
His biggest bone was the head of a mastodon, which inhabited South America. It weighed 70 kilos. But when trying to clean the fossil with a high pressure washer, there was an accident. “I removed the clay that was inside my head with the car wash, and many pieces of bone broke”, he laments.
The retired police officer says he has enjoyed collecting since he was a child. First it was pencils, then matches. “I had a lot of keyrings, but they started to rust.” On the bakery wall, there are also knives and swords, according to him, from Don Quixote, King Arthur, Robin Hood and the movie “Pirates of the Caribbean”.
Like any self-respecting collector, Mota studied hard. He knows how to identify almost all the fossils, knows the characteristics and geographic distribution of extinct animals and created explanatory “cards” with the help of paleontologist Alceu Ranzi.
But he got tired of the disinterest of the public power. For years, he has been trying to donate his collection, without success. “I’ve been fighting with all the mayors to open a public museum, but so far I haven’t been able to. I’m even sad. After so many years of collecting these things, I leave and don’t have a proper place to leave it for the public.”
“The collection is very relevant”, says paleontologist Lucy Souza, from Musa (Museu da Amazônia), in Manaus, who analyzed photos of the collection at the request of the report. “I’ve seen people have a vertebra, two or three teeth, but his collection is unique.”
“There are very well preserved fossils, mainly of giant sloths. I saw a complete mastodon jaw. This is a record that needs to be studied and can complement our knowledge of these animals from the Amazonian past”, he says.
For her, another relevant factor is the place where these pieces were found. “Marechal Thaumaturgo and the Juruá River are little explored places close to other regions. Even though they are already known species, these records help us to understand the distribution of species, the variations that may exist in their anatomy”, explains Souza, who also teaches at Faculdade Estácio do Amazonas.
According to the researcher, there is a lack of public policies for paleontology in the country.
“Archaeology, legislatively speaking, is much more advanced than paleontology. There is Iphan (Institute of National Historic and Artistic Heritage), a regulatory body that makes the law happen. team of archeologists to rescue this material”, he says.
“In paleontology, there is also a law that guarantees sovereignty over these fossils. They are Union heritage and must be protected and protected in public environments, but we do not have an agency capable of doing what IPHAN does. in a place with a fossil and destroy it, nothing will happen. It is a crime without punishment”, he compares.
This increased protection for archaeological artifacts, however, does not work in practice in all cases either. Santarém (PA), an Amazon city on the banks of the Tapajós River, was the scene in January of a dispute involving the Aldeia site, one of the most important in the Americas and registered in the National Registry of Archaeological Sites by IPHAN since 2008.
Without archaeological environmental licensing, the city government started building a camelódromo in Rodrigues dos Santos square, inside the Aldeia site. When starting the excavations, the workers came across a large smear of black Indian earth, indicative of millenary occupation, and ceramic fragments.
The work was embargoed after the mobilization of indigenous movements and other civil society entities, with support from the Federal Public Ministry. Although Santarém has archaeological recognition of continuous occupation since the 9th century, the city does not have a representation of Iphan.
In the case of fossils located, explains Souza, the correct procedure would be to contact a paleontologist. In Marechal Thaumaturgo, a city only accessible by boat and plane, the nearest professional is in Cruzeiro do Sul (AC), 140 km in a straight line.
It is the paleontologist Francisco Negri, professor at the local campus of Ufac (Federal University of Acre). Over the phone, he says that he has known Mota for many years and that the retired policeman has already contacted him to donate the fossils, but that his amateur colleague’s greatest wish is for the collection to remain in Thaumaturgo.
“I don’t have the authority to say that I’m going to take this stuff to a safe institution. I can’t take it out of his house. It would be rude to the years of work he went through collecting this stuff.”
