California Baseball: Day 12
La Brea Tar Pits
We had tickets for a 2:00 p.m. Saturday game at Dodger Stadium, so I decided to take Danny to one of the largest Ice Age fossil-excavation sites in the world – just a 15-minute drive down Wilshire Blvd., in the heart of Los Angeles.
The La Brea Tar Pits are a real oddity. Amidst the buildings and cars and noise of Los Angeles is an active archaeological site that has revealed more than one million bones from a variety of fascinating creatures who became trapped in tar some 10,000 to 40,000 years ago. You think of archaeological sites happening in dusty deserts, a small team quietly brushing off surfaces in relative solitude. The tar pits are a block from an IHOP.
The first written record of the tar pits came in 1769, during a Spanish expedition led by Gaspar de Portolá. Reports of geysers of tar, bubbling up in swampy settings, came to the attention of the Spanish explorers by way of their Native American scouts. The Chumash and Tongva people had used the tar to strengthen their redwood boats, sealing cracks and enabling the tribes to establish longer trade routes along the coast of California. Later, Mexican settlers employed the tar in the pitched roofs of their buildings.
The tar pits are the result of crude oil rising from fissures beneath La Brea and the neighboring Fairfax District to form pools of tar that harden into asphalt. Covered over time with dust and leaves, the tar captured unsuspecting animals in its unforgiving goo. Predators who spotted the animals followed them into the muck and became stuck themselves.
Since 1913, workers at La Brea have uncovered bones from more than 230 species of vertebrates and more than 3.5 million total specimens. The big animals are of course the most impressive to contemplate roaming around Los Angeles — mammoths, saber-toothed cats, bison, dire wolves, horses, a giant ground sloth, and an American lion. Several of these giants are on display at the Page Museum, next to the tar pits.
The discoveries continue at an amazing pace even today. In 2006, construction for an underground parking garage at the neighboring Los Angeles County Museum of Art unearthed more than a dozen new fossil deposits. Workers packed the asphalt into 23 large crates and carted it over to the museum, where it continues to be picked through meticulously under the banner “Project 23.” The most famous find from Project 23 is a mammoth skeleton the team named Zed. It was discovered nearly intact, save for a rear leg, a vertebra, and a piece of it’s skull damaged by construction equipment used for the parking structure.
Back inside the museum, we watched volunteers and scientists at the Fossil Lab work to clean and repair newly claimed fossils. Hardened asphalt is removed by soaking the bones overnight in a solvent. Bones that have been cracked or damaged during fossilization are reconstructed using adhesive. The bones are then transferred to the museum’s collections team for identification and storage.
The La Brea Tar Pits were an informative, pleasant, and intriguing experience just blocks from downtown Los Angeles. It was an excellent way to start the day. Time for the main event: a Dodger Dog and some afternoon baseball.