Living La Brea Loca - LA's Lost World.

When you mention LA, the first thing to come to mind is usually one of the following things; sun, beach, Hollywood, movie starts ,famous people, Griffith Park, Jared Leto... My mind, though guilty of one or two of the above, rushes elsewhere.

My mind conjures the sweetish, somewhat toxic stench of newly laid asphalt, orange roadwork cones (pylons) and sticky black ooze gathering in pools around my feet.
I'm not talking about roadworks. I'm talking about the La Brea Tar Pits in Hancock Park by the Page Museum. My favourite place in the world.

Meeting new friends.

The Page Museum is not the type of place you expect to find in the middle of a metropolis like Los Angeles, but on this site 40 000 years ago (careful people, we're moving into my ultimate Age of Geek) things were quite different.

This pit was flooded and now exists as a bubbling pond!

Picture a mastodon drowning slowly in thick, acrid, goopy tar while it's babydaddy and offspring stand on the bank in grief. Having trouble?

Now picture a flurry of carnivores lurking in the background, waiting for the male and spawn to disperse so they can begin feasting on the trapped female. Direwolves (so not just a product of Westeros), Teratorns, Bears, Giant Jaguars and Sabertooths alike were attracted to the pits where easy pickings could be made of unlucky herbivores. Unfortunately, in their eagerness to feed, the carnivores also often found their own demise.

Carnivores account for almost 90% of the fossil mammals and birds of prey 70% of the fossil birds in the Page Museum collections. An ongoing excavation at Pit 91 aims to determine whether this great abundance is natural or the result of collecting bias on the part of earlier excavators who tended to only collect the most spectacular and largest specimens. This is an issue in older sites all around the world and an important study when it comes to the validity of statistics  and our image of life in past times.

Did you see how I mentioned a Giant Jaguar up there without spending a good few lines geeking out? Yeah, that's not happening anymore. Naegele's Giant Jaguar was a behemoth among cats. Closely related to the African Lion and extinct European cave lion, it was once found from south western Canada to Mexico. More than 80 individuals have so far presented in the La Brea sections, giving us a unique opportunity to examine this majestic feline. Compared to African Lions, Naegele's Giant Jaguar did not live in prides, but in pairs or a lone, given the male/female ratio in the pits. This could, of course, be the result of more lone males falling into the pits. In African lions, females hunt mostly in pride-size groups. When encountering a natural trap like a tar pit, once a female is lost, the rest of the pride would avoid that area, males though... not so smart.

Lets move on to another pretty kitty. A pretty kitty with a pretty name; Smilodon fatalis. Doesn't it sound sweet? Let it roll off your tongue. Can anyone guess what this name means? Smiling Cat of Fate? Not so much.. more like Smiling Murder Cat. Smilodon fatalis is one of two sabertoothed cats found in the La Brea deposits. The other, Homotherium serum, the Scimtar Cat, has smaller teeth. Smilodon could roar like a lion and retract his claws (no painful snuggles here!), an active predator with a hunting method more on the 'I'll Stalk You To a Violent End' side as murder goes. Those teeth are not just swag, either. It seems, though, that Smilodon was also rather lazy and that rather than exert the energy such brutal thug-life requires, he preferred to stroll the tar pits on Sunday afternoons, nibbling on what Nature's coldcuts had to offer. 166,000 Smilodon bones have been recovered so far from the deposits. All the brawn... not so much with the brains.

 Not a cat person? Ever seen a Direwolf? Ghost, Nymeria, Lady, Grey Wind, Shaggy dog and Summer of Game of Thrones fame are not Direwolves as you should know them. Out of the five members of the Canis family that present at La Brea, the DireWolf is the big Daddy. Direwolves, with a collection of over 200,000 specimens are the most abundant species in the RLB biota. Given the high numbers of both Smilidon and Direwolf remains presenting in the tar pits, it's safe to conclude that they occupied different niches in the ecosystem. Where Smilidon was the lonesome thug, out to flex his muscles, Direwolves displayed a mob mentality, much like present day hyenas. Direwolves were social animals and ran in packs, like grey wolves today. Fossil evidence even shows that several specimens had healed pre-mortem injuries, the result of social healing where other pack members tended to the injured individual and nursed him or her back to health.

 And what could possibly be dying in the tar pits to tempt such carnivores as we've just run through? I don't know about you, but our forefathers did a lot worse than risk their life in a pool of tar to get hold of a mammoth steak. Mammoths and mastodons are both  present in the La Brea biota, but I have a thing for mammoths, so we're going to talk about them. More specifcally, we'll talk about Zed. I guarantee anyone who's ever seen Pulp Fiction is muttering 'Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead.' under their breath right about now. Zed is the most complete Columbian Mammoth to be recovered from La Brea. His remains can be seen in several places around the museum, most notably his skull and left tusk were clearly visible in the open lab (FANTASTIC open lab) and his spine is displayed in it's own case. It's quite possible you might have mistaken Zed's spine for a crocodile. I know that's the first thing I thought when I looked at it. You see, in addition to being the most complete specimen of his kind, Zed was also unique in that he suffered from a form of chronic arthritis called ankylosing spondylosis.

Other herbivores to lose their lives and consequently lure carnivores to their own sticky ends worth mentioning are Harlan's Giant Sloth, the American Buffalo, and the Western Horse.

The treasures of La Brea encompass far more than the megafaunal remains poking up through the sticky soil. Insects -large like dragon flies, and tiny beetles painstakingly sorted in the open lab- and pollen extracted from the deposits help form a detailed reconstruction of the biotope that was Hancock Park (and indeed downtown Los Angeles as a whole!) in the Ice Age.

All of this so far has been about the indoor exhibits. Outside in Hancock Park is, if possible, even more fun.
Not just because there are hummingbirds buzzing around the flora surrounding the waterlogged tar pits, nor the very snuggly statue of a Giant Sloth I spent a few moments petting.

Spread across the park, you find orange cones, each marking tar leaking up to the surface. Some larger pits are fenced in, others have already been completely excavated. Everywhere there are tarred sticks, evidence that mammalian curiosity hasn't exactly waned in the past 40 000 years. Interesting, yes; but that's not it either.

The outdoor area around the Page Museum is fun/awesome/amazing because you can stand and stare at the lucky excavators as they slowly-but-surely extract material from the ground. In fact, it looks like so much fun that a bone-loving, highly enthused Ice Age lover like myself had to have a serious talk with herself while observing Pit 91.. A little less willpower and I'd have been right in there with my trowel. There's also the opportunity to peer through the fencing and follow progress on the Project 23 - the excavation of 23 large deposits found in 2006 during the construction of an underground parking garage for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art next door.

I could go on forever about La Brea. Really I could. There's so much more there than a simple blog post could ever explain, no matter how hard I tried. You really jsut have to go there. See the tar, smell the tar, poke the tar with a stick.. Gaze in awe at the strange prehistoric animals that once wandered along Santa Monica Boulevard. You won't regret it.

Take the pictures at the entrance. Just do it.

Did this tickle your fancy? Read more about La Brea and their current excavations here!