Emily wanted to check out some dinosaurs bones so we went to visit the La Brea Tar Pits.
Unfortunately there were no dinosaur bones exhibited at this museum. Dinosaurs became extinct about 65 million years ago. The Le Brea Tar Pits encompasses animals from the last ice age around two million years ago. We were too late!
Until 11,000 years ago urban Los Angeles, specifically Hancock Park, was filled with wildlife. Though some smaller species survived, most of the large and exotic mammals became extinct. How?
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| Trying to 'mix' tar.. it was NOT easy! |
Tar.. or natural asphalt or 'brea' in Spanish had seeped up the ground for tens of thousands of years. The tar was often covered with dust, leaves or water. Over the centuries, bones of animals that were trapped in the tar were preserved.
Today the Page Museum is dedicated to researching the tar pits and displaying specimens of the animals that died there.
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| An adult bison and it's child |
Tar was pretty powerful stuff. Only about a few inches of tar can literally kill a huge mammoth or sabre tooth cat. How you ask? Well they aren't sinking in it if it's only a few inches deep. But they do get stuck in it and the more they struggle or move around the more they get stuck in the tar. It's like trying to take super glue off your hands. It's kind of hard when both hands become covered in it. The animals get stuck and eventually die from starvation and other predators attacking them. There have been many cases where a large animal like a mammoth is found there are also dire wolves (as many as 200) found next to it also. Since wolves live in packs it is easy to assume that they all go in for the kill and unfortunately get stuck also. A very painful way to die don't you think?
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| A Mammoth |
As the bones of dead animals sink into the asphalt, the tar soaks into them turning their bones dark-brown or black in color. The tar also preserves the bones and microfossils: wood and plants remnants, rodent bones, insects, seeds, leaves etc..
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| Volunteers patiently sift through the 'dirt' or 'pieces of asphalt' looking for those microfossils |
Prehistoric animals that were found in these pits are mammoths, dire wolves, short-faced bears, ground sloths and the infamous sabre toothed cat.
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| An example of what a tar pit looked like. Not too scary it is? Just don't step into it! |
The tar pits are visible today and are still under excavation.
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| An example of what paleontologists find in a tar pit. Numerous fossils of numerous animals all bunched together |
In 2006 the LA County Museum of Art began work on a new parking garage where they accidentally discovered an almost complete skeleton of an adult mammoth. They built wooden boxes around each deposit, 23 in all, and moved them to the Page Museum site. There they named this Project 23.
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| This is Zed, the newest addition to the Page Museum |
In addition to the boxes there were 327 buckets of fossil material recovered from the salvage site for paleontologists to clean and sort through! (Ross would have loved to work in LA!)
Pit 91 is the only long term excavation effort that the museum staff has been working on for almost 40 years. Work began in 1915 but since the site was unroofed it eventually caved in. In 1969 paleontologists returned to work on Pit 91 and in 1976 they installed the viewing station which allowed visitors to look directly in the pit and watch excavators work,
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| Pit 91 |
It is a slow going process since the weather definitely impacts the excavating process. Winter is too cold and wet so they mainly excavate during the summer months.
I must say it was a fascinating museum. Los Angeles is filled with great history! If you haven't checked this one out you should!
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