MUSEUMS
Mammoth Creatures
The most compelling characters in Movie Town are not on the silver screen—they’re in the ooze at the La Brea Tar Pits
By Brad Lemley
The Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits
5801 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, California
(323) 934-7243
| En route to the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, I encountered the featured attraction trying to escape. At the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Curson Avenue, about 100 yards from the museum’s entrance, I was amazed to see a fresh, four-foot-wide patch of goo bubbling out of the sidewalk. Several people had stepped in it, tracking black footprints in all directions. As it turns out, the stuff can erupt almost anywhere within a two-mile radius of the museum—a hefty chunk of greater L.A. “We’ve had people call us and say, ‘Your tar is coming up in our basement! What are you going to do about it?’” says John Harris, the chief curator of the museum. |
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Harris might well suggest that the callers count their blessings. While a soupçon of naturally occurring asphalt on a sidewalk or in a wine cellar is annoying, the substance meant slow, agonizing death for millions of Ice Age creatures. Here, just a five-minute limo ride from Beverly Hills, paleontologists have over the last century removed some 3.5 million fossilized animals and plants from the La Brea “matrix”—scientists’ term for the asphalt, clay, and sand mix in which the old bones are found. Most of the fossils are of predators who attacked asphalt-trapped herbivores and became stuck themselves, creating an ossified tableau of nature, red in tooth and claw. Aside from an open casting call, the museum is the best demonstration extant that modern Los Angeles is a thin veneer of civilization overlying a sea of brutality.
The dire wolf’s contemporary the Columbian mammoth (a replica of which can be seen sinking, above) weighed about 10 tons and consumed 700 pounds of vegetation a day. | Just past the sidewalk eruption, I entered the museum grounds and came to the Lake Pit. Actually a quarry from which asphalt was mined in the 19th century, it is now full of water covered with asphalt slicks. Fifteen feet offshore, a life-size fiberglass representation of a female Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) appears to be struggling in the ooze as her baby and mate watch helplessly from the bank. |
It’s creepy, but as Harris explains, something similar actually happened here countless times over the last 40,000 years as animals found themselves glued to the ground in midstride. “The asphalt seeps are like little volcanoes, oozing up from the North Salt Lake oil field,” which is just a few blocks north and about 1,000 feet underground. “They get covered with leaves. An herbivore—a camel, a bison, a ground sloth—unwittingly walks in and gets stuck; it can happen in as little as two inches of asphalt. Then the predators attack, then the vultures, then the flies. All of them get stuck and die.” That’s why the fossil collection is carnivore-centric:
The most common large-mammal find is the powerfully built and fiercely fanged dire wolf (Canis dirus), with 4,000 individuals in the collection, followed by the saber-toothed cat (Smilodon fatalis), with over 2,000 individuals. Recognizing the richness of the fossil hoard, businessman George Allan Hancock donated the 23 acres of park grounds to Los Angeles County in 1924. The museum was dedicated in 1977, and Hancock Park underwent a $10 million renovation in 1999.
Inside the airy, attractive museum itself are plenty of the requisite skeleton constructions, but one of the cleverest exhibits illustrates how the animals met their awful fates. Pairs of steel rods—one fat, one thin, representing the legs of small and large creatures—are sunk several inches into a vat of asphalt. Visitors can push and pull the rods and get a vivid sense of just how inescapable the stuff is; think of viscous molasses at about 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Indeed, says Harris, animals get caught even now: Squirrels, pigeons, ducks, storks, and hawks have become contemporary victims. During the major park renovation in the late 1990s, “we took the fence down around Pit 9, and two dogs got stuck. We salvaged them with a backhoe.”
| Once the Ice Age animals succumbed to predation or starvation, they keeled over and were buried by more asphalt and sediment. Today museumgoers can see the results from an observation platform above Pit 91, the deposit that the museum has been excavating since 1969. “It’s a surprise every time,” says senior excavator Karine Pezeril, who supervises a mostly volunteer crew. Standing 14 feet below the surface, where the fossils are about 40,000 years old, she waves a hand at the riot of bones. The spine of a bison, the pelvis of a dire wolf, and the scapula of a ground sloth all protrude from the matrix, which has the consistency of grainy fudge. |
From the sticky black muck of Pit 91, paleontologists have extracted giant sloths, saber-toothed cats, bison, horses, coyotes, insects, and birds. |
“It’s an embarrassment of riches,” says Harris.
Gently freed with dental tools and toothbrushes, fossils go from here to “the fishbowl,” a glass-walled, publicly viewed laboratory where they are soaked in n-propylbromide to extract the impregnated
