La Brea Tar Pits

On Friday Lou and I were off to the La Brea Tar Pits, about 20 miles north of us in West LA.  The area is densely developed city with tall buildings right up to the park on Wilshire Boulevard.  In addition to offices there are very attractive (but dense) neighborhoods.  This is immediately next to Beverly Hills city limits.  Many of the apartment buildings are of the kind you see in movies:  Low “U” shaped buildings with well-maintained, attractive courtyards in the middle.  Finally, several large museums are in the area including the Peterson Automotive Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Architecture and Design Museum.  You can look up the area, called “Miracle Mile” here.

Main park entrance on Wilshire Boulevard

By the way – Some setting on my camera changed that caused the soft focus – my apologies for the lack of clarity (both in and out of the pictures).

So, the first thing we’ve got to do is find a place to park.  We passed this lot about a block away, and decided to park on the street and feed the meters.  The meters about about $1 / hour so we went with that.

The entrance to the park has a fenced off “pond” of bubbling goo with an ersatz elephant stuck in it.  The surface is constantly churning from bubbles coming up from below.  We’re told the bubbles are formed by hydrocarbon-eating bacteria generating methane.  Apparently there is enough of it to occasionally cause issues in the surrounding buildings, which take special precautions to sense and avoid buildups of the explosive gas.

Next to the elephant, a live seagull had become entrapped in the tar.  A small crowd gathered to watch and fret over the doomed bird.  Later we saw employees fishing it out, but it was too late.

Here are more pictures of this pool.  Notice the bubbles:

 

We took a guided tour of the grounds.  In the middle of the front lawn we stopped at this mess.  The guide explained that these little pools form here and there around the park.  As we watched this one bubbled up more tar.  Eventually, they build a small wall around the pool.

This small pond had an active source of tar bubbling up (see below).  The ponds become a mix of tar, water and debris.  Apparently animals would approach to drink and become mired in the muck.  Before long, carnivores would approach to eat them and they too would get stuck.  They said these chain reactions would occur about once every 10 years, and would entomb dozens of animals and birds, and countless insects.

You can actually see a bubble that had just popped in this picture.

The entire surrounding area was tar pit starting about 40,000 years ago.  Because dinosaurs became extinct 65,000,000 years ago, there are no dinosaurs in the tar pits.

The docent mentioned that when excavating for a nearby garage in 2006 they found one of the largest and most complete mammoths in North America.  Parts of this animal are on display here and there around the Museum.

Here’s a few pictures from one of the pits where they are actively digging (though not at the moment of the pictures).  It’s about 15 feet deep and the active areas are divided into grids.  They remove the asphalt a few inches at a time looking for, not only fossils, but also “micro fossils” which include twigs, insects, pollen, pine cones, rodents, etc.  Water is drained off and what remains is the asphalt.  It becomes covered with dust and is apparently VERY sticky.  We watched a video that showed us the process.

Notice the stool in the center of this picture

 
This whiteboard was set up with some facts about the dig.  Here’s some of what it says:

• Tar is not hot
• We identify each fossil as we take it out of the ground
• Currently the pit is 15 feet deep
• We don’t find any bones in liquid asphalt.
• The most common animal found is the dire wolf.
• What smell?  (there was a hydrogen sulfide / rotten egg smell)
• Yes asphalt will stain your clothes
• We use Goop or mechanics degreaser to clean our hands
• Although we find lots of turtle shells and bones we have yet to find a turtle skull
• It has been estimated that ,,,, between 5 to 9 more feet … (before they reach the bottom)

This sculpture of a “short faced bear” (and friend) is lifesized.  These bears were larger then any currently living bear.

The Museum itself was an amazing collection of bones found since 1900.  The pits were initially mined for asphalt and a petroleum engineer was the first to document some of the finds.  We read that early scientists retrieved about 1,000,000 fossils in the 1910s.  Sadly, they didn’t save a lot of the surrounding material or document the locations very well, and a lot of information was lost.  In the  background of this shot are 400 of the more then 1600 Dire Wolf skulls found in the pits.  The foreground contains the nearly complete skeleton of a saber-toothed cat.

 

Here is a Jaguar:

They also found mammoths, mastadons, giant sloths, bison, camels, llamas, horses, elk, deer, bears, cheetahs, cougars, wolves, coyotes, weasels, 1 human, condors, eagles, hawks, falcons, vultures, cranes, goose, duck, herons, storkes, gommorants, ravens, magpies, larks, snakes, turtles, trout, insects, plants, and more.

Below is a particularly dense block brought up.  You can see it’s a tangle of fossilized bones:

When driving there, I spotted a sign for the National Council of Jewish Women in “Ethiopia Town”.  It’s a thrift shop:

During our visit to the park, I had to run back out to the parking meter and refill it (the meters only took 2 hours).  We stopped for lunch with about an hour left on the meter.  You can tell where this story is going.  With 10 minutes to go, I though we were nearly done, so thought it would be ok to risk it for a few minutes.  We returned to the car 6 minutes after the meter expired, and with a $58 ticket given 3 minutes earlier.

Location of our $80 lunch