Cueva del Milodón, Patagonia

In 1895 Hermann Eberhard, a German explorer of Patagonia, went into a cave on the flank of Cerro Benitez and found a large piece of skin that looked almost fresh. It belonged to an animal nobody could identify.

Otto Nordenskjöld explored the cave in 1896, and the skin was eventually recognised as Mylodon darwini, a ground sloth that died out between about 13,560 and 10,200 years ago. The cave is named after it. Skin, bones and other parts of the animal came out of the same cave, which is why the find carried so far: this was not a fossil impression but the creature itself, in pieces.

The monument sits 24 km northwest of Puerto Natales and 270 km north of Punta Arenas, and takes in several caves plus a rock formation called the Silla del Diablo, the Devil's Chair. The largest is Milodón Cave itself, 200 metres long.

Other extinct animals have come out of these caves, and so have human remains, which puts people and megafauna in the same place at the end of the Pleistocene.

A life-size replica of the Mylodon stands at the entrance to the monument. It was a very large herbivore, closer in build to a bear than to anything now living, and seeing the scale of it at the mouth of the cave is the point of putting it there.

The site sits on the End of the World Route, the scenic road network through Chilean Patagonia, close enough to Torres del Paine to be an easy addition to a trip there.

The monument is open to visitors and the main cave is walkable, with a path in and interpretation at the entrance, which makes it one of the more accessible palaeontological sites anywhere in Patagonia.