The Columbian mammoth roars. She feels her hooves sinking, the tar enveloping her ankles, pulling her deeper into the depths of the pits. Her baby at the edge of the tar pits squeals, but alas, it is useless.
The mammoth mother knows that her bones will next stand reconstructed under fluorescent lighting for tour guides to drag elementary school students past and for scientists to study.
OK, so Columbian mammoths probably didn’t have the foresight or imagination to see their futures, but the bug-eyed, forever bellowing fiberglass model of a Columbian woolly mammoth sinking in one of the famous La Brea tar pits outside of the Page Museum at the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits on Wilshire Boulevard sure makes you believe in vivid prehistoric mammal lives.
Prior to visiting the tar pits, I always found the mammoth incredibly creepy, its silhouette visible from miles down Wilshire Boulevard reminding passersby of what Los Angeles used to be: a landscape filled with animals wilder than Hollywood movie stars.
Yet upon visiting, reading the plaques inside the museum and admiring the fossils on display, the mammoth displays seemed less a creepy attempt at attracting tourists and more of an icon of the scientific discoveries about a mysterious age.
The La Brea Tar Pits always struck me as a mysterious body of prehistoric death trap goo that looked a lot like what I imagined the chocolate river from Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” to be. In reality, the pits are surface oil slicks composed of asphalt with bubbles of methane that escape from fissures below the lake. That, of course, explains why it smells like a gas station and why constant bubbles erupt like large prehistoric fish farts from beneath the surface.
More importantly, though, the tar pits have yielded the most prehistoric fossils of any other site in the world, which makes it all the more mind-blowing that they’re located on one of Los Angeles’ busiest and most urban streets.
Upon entering the Page Museum, the first sign I read ““ before I even purchased my $4.50 student ticket for entrance ““ was an incredibly disappointing one: “No dinosaurs were found at the Tar Pits.”
I assumed that tour guides were probably just fed up with numerous school-aged students asking about how many T. Rexes had flailed their tiny arms to escape the stinky black death goo.
In perhaps an attempt to compensate for the lack of intrinsically exciting dinosaur stories and fossils, the plaques accompanying each set of bones from the pits tries to capture the action-packed tales of other prehistoric creatures.
Behind a wall of glass, a furry model of a saber-toothed cat ““ “NOT A TIGER” ““ bares its sharp, pointed teeth, while an animatronic woolly mammoth rears its stiff, jerky head and occasionally lifts up its trunk to emit a disappointingly quiet guttural roar.
Then, of course, an animatronic saber-toothed cat forever rips its teeth into giant, animatronic, ground-sloth flesh.
The legions of kids visiting the museum were, of course, content with these displays.
Most popular of all, though, was a giant pot of goo in the middle of the museum with pulleys that visitors could pull up in order to feel how tough it would be to pull one’s self out of a giant tar pit.
Yet the parents attempted to steer their kids to the walls of fossils, attempting to make the experience all the more educational with rudimentary anatomy and natural science lessons.
This, after all, is the type of museum that any 10-year-old home-schooled boy, dressed by his mother in a Polartec fleece sweatshirt and orthopedic slip-ons, would die for.
In fact, one boy at the museum seemed to already know everything. His mother pointed to a set of ground-sloth bones in a display case.
“Look, those are the phalanges. You see that?” she said.
Her son scoffed and crossed his arms.
“Yes, but I think it’s actually said “˜philang-is.’ That’s what I read.”
“Oh, well, pardon me,” the mother asserted, no longer pointing out the other bones.
The strangest part of the museum, however, was a section called “the fish bowl,” where visitors had a peek into the museum’s laboratory to watch researchers in white lab coats sort microfossils and clean bones.
The day I visited, a sign hung inside the fish bowl letting visitors know that the researchers today were cleaning a saber-toothed cat’s body (whom they named “Zed”).
I couldn’t help but feel like a visitor at an alien zoo where a group of humans had been captured to reveal the secrets of the natural world.
Placed in a semicircle around the edge of the fish bowl, each researcher had his or her own microscope.
A dry erase board mounted in front of each researcher, too, displayed written messages about what he or she was doing. For example, “Hello! I am cleaning part of Zed’s humerus!” or “I am cleaning part of Zed’s vertebrae!”
As one of the researchers looked up, he caught me staring and smiled, catching me slightly off-guard.
Somehow, I expected the researchers not to interact; after all, they were on display in a museum.
I may not be a natural science buff but after viewing displays of ground-sloth skeletons, woolly mammoth tusks, Golden Eagle foot bones and other prehistoric creatures, I couldn’t help but marvel at our changing natural world and how much we continue to discover about the creatures that used to be the kings of this now-urban landscape. .
If you ever feel like a human captured to be put in an alien zoo, e-mail Cohn at jcohn@media.ucla.edu.