Ameghino was born on September 19, 1853, in Tessi, an hamlet of Moneglia, a municipality of Liguria in Italy, in what was then the Kingdom of Sardinia and moved to Argentina with his parents when he was 18 months old.

Phylogeny, published in 1884, was a theoretical work on developing an evolutionary concept in the Lamarckian vein, and led to the establishment of zoological taxonomy as a discipline with mathematical foundations.

A year later his magnum opus appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mammalian Fossils in the Argentine Republic, comprising 1028 pages and an atlas.

[2] He later served as director of the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum, in Buenos Aires, and in 1906 published Sedimentary Formations of the Cretaceous and Tertiary Eras in Patagonia, a work of synthesis is not limited to descriptions, but it raises hypotheses about the evolution of various mammals and analyzes the different layers of the crust and their possible ages.

This was an important contribution to the known catalog of extinct mammals, and would, along with the Ameghino collection, be consulted by scientists from America and Europe in subsequent years.

Several Argentine cities are named Florentino Ameghino as well as various educational institutions across the country, libraries and museums, squares, schools, parks and other locations.