By Barbara McGuire
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
If Los Angeles seems wild now, imagine what it must have been
like at the end of the Ice Age, when saber tooth cats, American
lions and Colombian mammoths roamed the streets.
Today, thousands of years after the extinction of these amazing
animals, scientists can find their remains and learn of their
“wild” lifestyles at the La Brea Tar Pits.
Composed of the Page Museum and Hancock Park, the La Brea Tar
Pits offers a comprehensive look at what life was like in Los
Angeles 10,000 to 40,000 years ago.
“There were over 100 tar pits dug in Rancho La Brea, which
now compromises the 23 acres of Hancock Park,” said tar pit
administrator Kurt Abdouch in a recent phone interview.
“Each major tar pit area perhaps has a special flora or
fauna from which certain kinds of fossils were recovered,”
Abdouch said.
Currently under excavation, for the summer only, is Pit 91,
which was originally discovered in 1915. Excavation didn’t
begin until 1969 and the pit has been worked on annually every
summer for the past 31 years. According to Abdouch, Pit 91 is a
very special site.
“It is the longest continuing urban paleontological
excavation on the planet,” he said. “There’s no
urban excavation of its kind anywhere else on earth.”
Every day through Sept. 10, Page Museum paleontologists and
volunteers will be searching in the pit for remains of ancient
animals such as dire wolves and ground sloths. No dinosaurs are
found here, however, as many often think when they hear the word
excavation.
Approximately 1,000 vertebrate fossils and 50 five-gallon
buckets of sediment containing microfossils are unearthed from the
pit each summer.
According to Abdouch, this can create many years worth of work
cleaning, identifying, cataloging and adding the specimens to the
collection.
Located in the Page Museum is an actual laboratory where
scientists do all of this processing work.
“One of the major exhibits is a working laboratory inside
the museum that visitors can actually peer into and see trained
volunteers as well as professional scientists who work on the
fossil remains that are literally coming out of the tar
pits,” Abdouch said.
“We call it the fish bowl laboratory,” he continued.
“They are not actors; these are people who are toiling daily
at trying to understand the fossil record here and add to the
knowledge that we have about the last Ice Age.”
Inside the museum there are various displays and exhibits on the
wide range of animals that once inhabited Los Angeles. One can see
the bones of the only human being to ever be recovered from the tar
pits, a woman whose origins are believed to be the Catalina
Islands. Her age is marked at about a thousand years old.
Also of interest is a special exhibit, “Mammoths: Wild and
Woolly” which will be at the Page Museum through Sept. 17.
This exhibit details the origins, evolution, migration to North
America and eventual extinction of the mammoth. On display will be
mammoth tusks and teeth, as well as a piece of woolly mammoth.
The Page Museum, however, is more than just a collection of
fossils. Also offered to visitors is an understanding of the
personality and rich cultural history behind the museum.
“There is some social history here as well,” said
Abdouch about the Page Museum. “Various commercial activities
occurred in Hancock Park before it became a park.”
La Brea Tar Pits is just one of the many aspects of Los Angeles
that make the city one of the most unique places on earth. Not
every city can claim to have one of the richest deposits of fossils
right smack dab in its heart.
“(The museum site) was an oil field and it was also an
asphalt mine before we discovered the true treasures here, which
were the fossils in unprecedented numbers,” Abdouch said.
“This is the most important site of its kind in the
world.”
MUSEUM: The La Brea Tar Pits and the Page Museum are located at
5801 Wilshire Blvd. The Museum is open seven days a week from 10
a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $6 for adults, $3.50 for students and
seniors and $2 for children, ages 5-12. Parking is accessible for
$5. Information can be obtained by calling (323) 934-PAGE or at
www.tarpits.org.