Egidio Feruglio Palaeontology Museum: Patagonian dinosaurs in Trelew

Trelew is about 65 kilometres from Puerto Madryn, almost all of it on National Route 3 through low steppe and fence lines. Right in the city centre, on Avenida Fontana, stands the Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio, known as the MEF. It opened in December 1990 in an old furniture store on Calle 9 de Julio and moved in 1999 to its current building, some 3,000 square metres in size.

Named after geologist Egidio Feruglio, the museum holds a collection of more than 17,000 fossils. The visit is laid out as a walk back in time: it begins with the first people of Patagonia and steps backwards, room by room, to the giant mammals and birds that came after the dinosaurs, and further still to the Mesozoic.

That is what most people come for. In the renewed permanent exhibition you walk beneath Patagotitan, the titanosaur the museum's team excavated in 2014 near El Sombrero, about 260 kilometres from Trelew, and you can stand next to an original thighbone more than two metres long. Other Patagonian names share the hall, among them Carnotaurus, Tyrannotitan chubutensis and Piatnitzkysaurus. Every replica on display is built in-house by the MEF team.

The other thing worth taking slowly is the lab. The exhibition opens a view into the museum's largest preparation laboratory, where the latest finds are cleaned and stabilised: plaster-wrapped blocks just as they arrive from the field, fine tools, bones half freed from the rock. This is science in progress, not a sealed display case.

The museum also runs the Bryn Gwyn Palaeontological Park, about 8 kilometres from Gaiman, with an easy trail along the southern cliffs of the valley; with enough time, you can fit both into the same day.

• Tour type: Cultural and educational, great for families
• Difficulty level: Easy
• Tip: Check opening days and hours on the museum's official website before leaving Madryn, and save some time for the lab, which changes depending on the fossils being worked on.