Natural Science Museum of Valencia
Complete six-meter fossil giant sloth skeleton anchors a South American paleontology collection once called Europe's finest.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the Natural Science Museum of Valencia opens in 1788, when a Dominican friar in Madrid knelt over a newly arrived skeleton's forearm-long claw and called it a wonder and providence of the Lord. It follows how a French anatomist, working only from engravings of that same claw, reached the opposite conclusion, ending a long-running theory about where oversized bones came from. The skeleton on display traces to a Valencian engineer who gathered thousands of bones on engineering projects across Argentina, Brazil and the Andes. Look closely at the claw in front of you, the same shape a friar once mistook for proof of God.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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