Helen FieldsScience Writer

I’ve been hearing about the La Brea tar pits forever, so I was pretty darn excited when a friend suggested we go see them while I was in Los Angeles. The tar pits were – are – naturally-occurring tar seeps in the middle of downtown Los Angeles. Animals would wander up, see the tasty water, walk in to take a drink, get sucked in by the tar, and die. Which means there’s a truly incredible number of bones down there. And a museum to show them: the Page Museum.

First of all, let’s get straight what kind of animals we’re seeing:

Definitely no dinosaurs. You got that? No. Dinosaurs. They must get this question a lot – the sign is right at the desk where you buy the tickets. The dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, but Los Angeles was under water until about 100,000 years ago. Animals fell into the tar pits pretty recently, when there were already people in the area. (Ok, I think people turned up sometime during the period they refer to – between 40,000 and 11,000 years ago.)

So, this museum is mostly about prehistoric mammals, like American lions and short-faced bears and dwarf pronghorns, all of which used to roam Los Angeles. Most of what the museum has is bones, which, if you like bones, is awesome. My friend and I spent most of the time wandering around talking about evolution (she did her PhD thesis on it, it still confuses me) and talking about comparative anatomy (quite easy to do when you have so many bones to look at).

For example, we talked a lot about elbows and knees:

This is the front part of a California sabertooth. They don’t call them sabertooth tigers anymore, because they aren’t particularly closely related to tigers.

In mammals, anyway, elbows and knees all seemed to bend the same way – elbows point backward when they bend, knees point forward when they bend. These are elbows, at the bottom left. They bend like ours. But mammals vary a lot in where they put these joints.

Cats and dogs keep elbows where we do – in the middle of the leg. Arm. Whatever. But horses keep them way up by the shoulder:

Sorry, there are a lot of bones in that picture. The horse leg is in the foreground. It’s standing on its toes, or fingers; its heel – or the heel of its hand – is about halfway up the leg; and the elbow is up by its ribcage, just below the shoulder

This may not seem particularly earth-shattering, but it kept us entertained the whole time at the museum, figuring out which bones on different animals corresponded.

There were lots of mammoths in the museum, including this 12-foot-tall Columbian Mammoth, the most common mammoth in North America at that time:

So, I asked, why did all these go extinct? Humans killed them, right? My friend (who prefers to be anonymous on the internet, sorry to be all cloak-and-dagger) said, actually, nobody knows. There was climate change, and it looks like there was an asteroid impact and giant forest fires, and maybe human hunters helped, too. But nobody knows for sure.

The museum is arranged around a lovely green atrium, with this lovely great blue heron:

Ok, that’s a fake great blue heron. A sign explained that they’re trying to discourage a real great blue heron from using the pond as his cafeteria (see the orange koi?), so the decoy is there to make him think somebody’s already claimed it. And if you do see a real one, you’re supposed to tell the staff so they can shoo him off.

And if you go outside, the tar pits are still there, burbling away in the park that contains the Page Museum and the L.A. County Museum of Art.

They really do burble – little bubbles of methane gas come up to the surface and pop. Note that they are fenced off, so you don’t turn into a fossil yourself. And excavations are still going on – in 2006, the art museum started digging to build an underground garage and came across 16 new areas of fossil deposits. They brought up 23 big crates of asphalt (absolutely stuffed with bones), which are now being excavated in the park.

UPDATE, later: I forgot to say, the tar pits smell like tar! Ok, maybe that’s not surprising, but it’s cool.

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