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.