L.A.'s Oldest Tourist Trap
At Rancho La Brea, death has been the pits for millennia
Sid Perkins

Cruise Los Angeles' Wilshire Boulevard and, when you reach the 5800
block, you'll often catch a whiff of fresh tar. Most likely, it won't be
coming from a road or roofing crew, but you'll have a big clue to its
source. On the north side of the boulevard, there's a life-size
fiberglass model of a terrified mammoth stuck hip-deep in goo. The
figure marks one of the world's most well-known fossil-bearing locales:
the La Brea tar pits. "I certainly know when I've reached work each
morning," says John Harris, a curator at the George C. Page Museum
there.

This 57,000-square-foot facility houses the millions of bones unearthed
at the site. Most of those bones, which began accumulating in the tar
pits about 44,000 years ago, were exhumed early in the 1900s, says
Harris. Following a half-century hiatus in collecting, due in part to a
backlog of specimens and changing museum priorities, scientists in 1969
began more-thorough excavations at one of the park's sites.

Data from those more-modern digs are yielding a wealth of information
about the region's ecosystems during recent ice ages and interglacial
periods. A simple tally of which body parts have been preserved in the
tar-laced sediments is shedding light on prehistoric food chains. Also,
sophisticated chemical analyses of the bones themselves are yielding
surprising details about how the animals succumbed to the pits and what
happened to them in their final, wrenching hours.

Read the rest at Science News
http://www.sciencenews.org/20040124/bob9.asp

Comment:
The article is reasonably long, so don't be too judgemental of the first
section.

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Robert Karl Stonjek.
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