La Brea Tar Pits

La Brea Tar Pits, Los Angeles, CA

My favorite place to visit in Los Angeles is not the surfer beaches of Malibu or the gravity-defying rides of Disneyland.  It is a quiet corner of the distant past bubbling with methane:  the La Brea Tar Pits.

 

When you look at this first photo, taken through a fence less than a year ago, you see circles of wakes on the water’s surface.  This is the natural gas (methane) and asphalt bubbling up from underground vents, a natural phenomenon that has occurred in this spot for 50,000 years.  In the background you can see a highrise; this is Wilshire Boulevard, a fast-paced and densely-populated thoroughfare in the Miracle Mile district.  In the foreground is a life-sized model of a trapped American mastadon.  It is a mind-blowing mix of cultures and eras, all taking place in the same spot on earth.

 

Page Exhibit: Sabertoothed tiger attacking giant ground sloth

Deep below this lake in Hancock Park are oil fields.  Tectonic plate movements created fissures long ago resulting in the natural seepage of asphalt from the oil fields up to the earth’s surface.  Throughout the ages, this heavy oil substance thickened in pools and became covered with leaves and sediment.

 

Rancho La Brea, as it was once called, was home to a large variety of birds and mammals that wandered this Los Angeles Basin in the late Pleistocene Ice Age.  When the tar pools warmed up they became sticky, and animals were rendered immobile, and trapped in the asphalt tar.  Predators would come in after the animals, and they too would become entrapped.

 

Mammoth skeleton at Page Museum

Due to the preservative nature of asphalt, bones and fossils have been uncovered from the tar pits.  Through a process of radiometric dating on tar deposits found in the bones, it has been determined that the animals date back 11,000 to 50,000 years.

 

It was in the early 1900s when the value of these bones as windows into the past became recognized.  And now, after a century of excavation, these tar pits have uncovered the world’s richest deposit of Ice Age fossils.  The remains of now-extinct mastadons, mammoths, sabertoothed cats, giant ground sloths, camels, dire wolves, horses, and the giant jaguar have been found here.  Many other extinct birds, mammals, and plants have also been found.  Excavation continues to this day.

 

Through the tenacity and forethought of paleontologists, scientists, and other dedicated professionals spanning the past century, over 100 tons of fossil bones have been recovered here, representing 231 vertebrates and as many invertebrates.

 

Los Angeles, California

Amid numerous excavation pits on this sight in Hancock Park is a museum highlighting the incredible array of fossils found here.  The George C. Page Museum hosts an extensive collection of fossils and Ice Age skeletons from the tar pits here on this Los Angeles city block.

 

Imagine parking your car in a lot where mastadons once tromped, and checking your messages on the grass where sabertoothed cats pounced on ground sloths.  This is a unique natural history experience.

 

Photo credit:  Athena Alexander