La Brea Tar Pits

Hi, all! Beth here, with another overdue update. Here's a bit about my visit to the La Brea Tar Pits, possibly one of the coolest things I've seen in LA so far. I went here with my East Coast visitors on an unseasonably hot day.

This was a glimpse at the largest tar pit...they have a fake mammoth stuck in the tar for dramatic effect. They also have statues of the mammoth's panicked family standing at the edge of the pit.

I was so surprised to see and hear the tar slowly and intermittently bubbling, like a boiling pot of really thick, sticky stew. You can also smell the tar. It smells a bit like gasoline.

Inside the George C. Page Museum, there's a real working laboratory. No one was working while we were there, but normally you would be able to watch real-live scientists at work, brushing off teeny-tiny fossils, cataloging finds, and generally being awesome. (I can tell I would love their nerdiness—see the license plate that says "I DIG91"?)

While weaving our way through Hancock Park and among the pits, we came across some giant wooden crates. These are a part of Project 23, an endeavor to explore the contents of—you guessed it—twenty-three blocks of excavated material ("asphaltic deposits") from the grounds. This stuff was dug up to create a parking area, and the team has uncovered more than 700 fossils from it so far.
As I learned from the educational museum videos, the La Brea Tar Pits have yielded one of the world's richest collections of Ice Age fossils. That's why the folks at the Page Museum can display an entire wall's worth of dire wolf skulls (there are more displays like the one above; 400 skulls in all, I believe)—they have plenty to spare (1600 or so found to date). (P.S. Yes, this was a real animal, which I had never heard of. Possibly the inspiration for the one-word direwolves from Game of Thrones.) These animals are the most common found at this site. Scientists suspect that the wolves, being pack hunters, would team up to attack prey stuck in the tar...and get stuck themselves.

I somehow left this adventure with a tiny splotch of tar on my pants. I really have no idea how this happened. The pits are fenced in, so you're not really all that close to the tar. Leave it to me to accomplish something like this. Well, now I can say firsthand that modern-day laundry chemicals are no match for Pleistocene tar.