Wandering scholars discover the Page Museum at La Brea Tar Pits.
Recent travels allowed for a quick visit to the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits. Now in their one hundredth year of excavation, the site has yielded over 600 species to date with a NISP of over 3.5 million (not counting over 200 bacteria). It’s a remarkable place and I feel privileged to to have been given an excellent tour by Dr John Harris and Curator Gary Takeuchi. Tar still bubbles and oozes and excavations continue, thanks in part to continuing growth of this highly urbanized area.
Chuck and George with Dr John Harris and Gary Takeuchi
Although most of the tar seeps are closed off for safety, a couple can be accessed with a guide. The surface is just as deceptive as it is described and is often covered with leaves and dirt. The tar can also be deceptively solid feeling until the incredible stickiness locks your feet to the tar. Dr Harris provided a great example by having us poke the tar with a wooden lath. Even though it is solid enough to resist the lath for more than a top inch or two, it is extremely difficult to pull it back out again and it’s easy to imagine a hooved animal becoming mired almost instantly to await it’s demise by large cat or wolf or even thirst.
You just gotta poke it with a stick…
For reasons that aren’t completely clear, there are an extremely high number of predators and scavengers in the mix, implying that many carnivores may be tempted by a struggling animal but the more cautious grazers were likely scared away by their thrashing comrades. The upshot of this is an enormous number of coyotes, wolves, saber-toothed cats, short-faced bears, and American lions as well as the full gamut of vulture-like birds filling these pits and seeps. Below I am holding the humerus of a Smilodon fatalis, a prevalent creature at the Tar Pits.
Examining a freshly excavated smilodon humerus (upper arm of saber-toothed cat).
Examining the mounted saber-toothed cats.
And of course, a mammoth.
A couple of mastodon.
Just a glimpse of the over 3.5 million specimens housed at the Page.
We had a wonderful tour of the “fish-bowl” lab by Shelly Cox. Here we examine the newly cleaned mammoth tusk.
Tusks grow like tree-rings and tell scientists a lot about the environment the creature lived in by proxy. A section of this particular specimen has been removed for analysis already.
Cranium of a very familiar looking mammoth. Although not found inundated in tar, there is still enough in the sediment that it is oozing from the cleaned skull.
For anyone interested in Ice Age fauna, the Page Museum is a definite “must see” stop on the journey through life.
Click the mammoth to see more from the Page Museum at http://www.tarpits.org.
“For two weeks, Denver Museum of Nature & Science crews have been pulling out treasures: five or more mastodons, a bison skull with 7-foot horn span, a couple of Columbian mammoths, a giant Jefferson ground sloth (the state’s first), complete deer with antlers, salamanders, snails, two more bison — a “prehistoric zoo,” as local headlines read.”
Although the details are still not completely clear, the site appears to span tens of thousands of years and represents animals dying at the high altitude watering hole. There are crustaceans preserved in the eolian sediment which should provide information about the environment at the pond.
So far, it is estimated that there are as many as a dozen mammoths in the site. Read the Denver Post article here
