Our Saturday of epicness began with G-ma making us "G-ma eggs". For the uninitiated, that's a dish she makes with soft boiled eggs and buttered toast, all chopped up in a bowl and served hot. It's so good!!! Nobody makes it like G-ma. She also cut up some more fresh oranges for us. I wish I was eating all of that, right now.
Of course Luke said, "No like it" and opted for Wheat Thins and some Sprite he found in the car.
Our first stop of the day was the La Brea Tar Pits, which bubbled up right in the middle of Hollywood/Beverly Hills. Well OK...the tar pits were there first.
We got a little bit lost (in some very nice neighborhoods!) because we couldn't find Wilshire Blvd., despite us having MapQuest directions--which I printed off at our hotel in Anaheim after our GPS fiasco. But we eventually came upon this:
Must be the place! There's a natural asphalt (tar) deposit that bubbles up in this area, as well as methane gas. You can imagine the lovely smell! The statues are demonstrating what happened here during the ice age: animals would go to get a drink and not realize that there was sticky tar underneath the surface and get stuck. That would attract predators, who would then get stuck too, which attracted vultures, who got stuck, etc, etc. They'd all die on top of each other and the tar would seep into their bones and harden. Then a few thousand years would go by, more liquid tar would bubble up, and the cycle continued. I think the oldest fossils they've found are 40,000 years old.
Some early Californians started mining for tar here in 1913, and lo and behold the whole place was full of fossilized bones! I think to date they have unearthed over 3.5 million specimens. The Page Museum was built to show some of the skeletons they've dug out.
Sabertoothed cats
Wooly mammoth (model is a smaller scale replica). Check out that pelvic bone on the right!
THAT is a full sized wooly mammoth--even a couple feet shorter than it was capable of being.
They have vats of tar with sticks in them that you can pull out to see how hard it would have been to try to get out of. I remember doing this as a kid when we came here with my family.
This mastadon always reminds me of a cyclops.
The animal they found most in the tar pits was the dire wolf, apparently because they'd come in packs when they found a stranded animal. That whole wall is full of their skulls.
Their Fish Bowl Lab is where you can watch scientists excavate and examine specimens (if they aren't all out to lunch, that is...)
Wooly mammoth molar
A ground sloth duking it out with a sabertoothed cat. Just like on the movie Ice Age! (One of Luke's favorites, btw.)
Along with sabertoothed cats, mammoths, mastadons, dire wolves and giant ground sloths, there were short nosed bears, camels, bison, horses, coyotes, condors and jaguars. Plus lots of birds, small mammals, bugs, plants, a fossilized tree, and evidence of primitive people and their tools.
This shot of the area in the 40's happens to be the neighborhood of Sherman Oaks, where my G-ma lives. She and my G-pa built their house there around that time, when it was only fields and dairy farms. Now she's only five houses over from the Ventura Freeway. Apparently a lot of her friends' houses had to be bulldozed when that was built.
We got some smashed pennies, which are my favorite souvenirs and I get them whenever I see a machine.
We went to the super awesome gift shop
Madelyn got a big acrylic faceted heart key chain, which of course has nothing to do with fossils or science or anything. She spent a full ten minutes agonizing over the pink, red, blue or purple choices and finally decided on the blue.
We walked across the park and came across the Los Angeles County Museum of Art next door. It's not really our thing, though, so we just looked at some of the sculptures outside and I told Mark that he should quit his job and start making concrete rectangles and heaps of scrap metal and sell them as modern art. Apparently someone is making a living doing that!
Then we went and saw pit #91. Look at all the bones just poking out! You can imagine what dirty work that must be.
Picture from around 1920
By the way, there are no dinosaur bones in the pits. They lived 65 million years before these ice age animals did. Try and wrap your mind around that!
Project 23---in 2006, work began for an LA parking garage when they discovered they were on top of more fossil deposits. So they basically cut out 23 huge chunks of asphalt with the bones, boxed them up, and they're sitting there until someone goes through and excavates them.
This is such a cool place to visit, and there's a lot that we didn't see. Hopefully next time!
