Juan Gallardo, a natural born paleontologists passed away today

["Ing. Yasmani Ceballos Izquierdo" <yceballos@uci.cu>]

Colleagues
Today passed away Juan Gallardo, a natural born fossil hunter, from Viñales, 
western Cuba, which  collected with Carlos de la Torre (Univ. Havana), Barnum 
Brown (AMNH), David Dunkle (USNM), and many others.
He was a kind and lovely person which we all are going to miss.  His legacy is 
to have found many important fossil elements of the Jurassic and Cretaceous 
marine biota of the ProtoCaribbean in the Sierra de los Órganos mounstains of 
western Cuba.

http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/1232585/758569109/name/Juan%20Gallardo%202011.pdf


Best Regards,
Yasmani

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The occurrence of Jurassic land and coastal sediments in western Cuba is 
well-known, but despite many years of search with Juan Gallardo and other 
coleagues, no other than the specimen found by Carlos de la Torre early last 
century show up. We dis look for dinosaurs bones in Puerto Rico, Hispaniola and 
Cuba during several field seasons, but again a s yet, this search has been 
unsuccessful, perhaps because rocks of late Cretaceous age are strongly 
weathered and the potential bones are hard to find on the surface. But I will 
continue to search." 

Manuel A. Iturralde-Vinent, en National Geographic, 2002