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.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

I like how the tortoise (in Boston’s Copley Square last weekend) is dressed up for the holidays. Do you think the decoration would help him win the race? Or create drag and slow him down? Or motivate the bunny to kick some turtle butt for once in his lazy life?

Merry Christmas!

It’s funny to wish someone a “merry” day. Who ever describes anything as “merry” anymore? I wonder if that’s a Victorian holdover.

The Dictionary of the Week is a new acquisition. Yesterday I was killing time (and seeking heat) in Harvard Square, so I ducked into a used bookstore. Then I realized that they specialize in scholarly used books, so I was ready to duck right back out into the 20-degree-F outdoors when I stumbled across the dictionary section. Of course I couldn’t resist The Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary for $7.95.

It’s not for translating between Australian and English; it’s a dictionary of English, as it is used in Australia. You know, like a Webster’s dictionary of American English, but with more marsupials.

First: pronunciation. The pronunciation guide in the front defines the sound “ah” thus: “as in calm, path, arm.” Er…those are three totally different sounds. In college, I studied abroad in Australia and New Zealand with a friend named Becca who has been known as “Beaker” (to a lucky few) ever since – because that’s just how everyone pronounced her name.

Australian English also has lots of words I don’t use in my daily life. Take the phrase “mad as a gum tree full of galahs.” A galah (guh-lah) is a kind of Australian cockatoo – the word comes, says the dictionary, from the word “gilaa” in the Yuwaalaraay language. Australian English has no shortage of words for different cockatoos and wallabies and shrubs, but the differences go beyond that: the preposition “longa,” in Aboriginal English, means “belonging to; near; about; with.” And a “furphy” is a “false report or rumour,” which comes from a kind of cart that was a center of gossip during the second world war.

I love the diversity of English. Down there on the other side of the world, people are going about their lives speaking something that doesn’t just have a different accent from what I speak; it’s got a vocabulary all its own. And over there in England, “pants” has a different meaning. And yet we’re all speaking something descended from the language of this guy.

This dictionary does, however, lead me to wonder if “pocket” means something different in other English dialects. The book is the weight of one of the larger Harry Potters, and while it does fit in one of the bigger pockets on my raincoat, it pulls that whole side down, and I think I would prefer to wing it, dictionary-free, on the mean streets of Melbourne. In the same used bookstore I saw a Kodansha “pocket” Japanese dictionary – also published by Oxford – that was almost as big as a toaster.

Dictionary Stats: The Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary, 5th ed.

date: 2002
publisher: Oxford University Press
editor: Bruce Moore
length: 1298 pages (I said it was big)
guide words on p. 1010: shake-a-leg n. Aust. style of traditional Aboriginal dancing; shamefaced adj. 1. showing shame. 2. bashful, shy.
useful extras: A map on the back endpaper shows where more than 90 Australian Aboriginal languages are spoken, from Adnyamathanha (central South Australia) to Yuwaaliyaay (northern New South Wales).
obscenities: Nope. Hm. That seems a little unrealistic. This is Australia we’re talking about. Also, “tranny” is defined as “transistor radio.”

This kind of image is on a very large percentage of the headstones in Boston’s historic burial yards:

Seventeenth-century Puritans were opposed to using religious imagery (like crosses) on gravestones, so they went for reminders of the limits of mortal life, instead. Yipe. Note the grinning teeth, partly hidden by the leaves.

So, just a friendly reminder: You are going to die. You might want to bookmark this for later.

Here’s an introduction to gravestone iconography, courtesy of the City of Boston.

Handy website: a list of public radio stations across the country that stream live, including (where available) what’s on right now. So if, say, you’re in a hotel in Boston where the clock radio is broken but the wifi works, and you happen to be with your dad who loves A Prairie Home Companion, well, the internet is here to help.

There is nothing I love like a good old-school museum. And Harvard’s Museum of Natural History? It is OLD school. Ok, it has many excellent modern displays teaching scientific concepts. And it also has:

Boxes of rocks!

(Excuse me: cabinets of minerals. I learned today that a mineral is not a rock; rocks are made up of minerals. I’m still working out this whole geology thing, and I thank the museum people of the world for helping to teach me.)

Also: Cases of birds!

(SO MANY cases of birds. I love birds. Although, I must say, you don’t learn a lot when you just look at a couple hundred birds in a case. Pretty, but…not that informative.)

And also:

South American vertebrates! Thank goodness it’s only selected representatives. There are a lot of vertebrates in South America. (Not to worry – the museum has vertebrates from everywhere else, too.) (There is one black rhinoceros that is crying out for a wealthy alum to fund its retaxidermying, if that is a word, and it should be.)

But by far my favorite room is this one:

Several whale skeletons, a taxidermied giraffe, SO MANY BIRDS, deer, apes – this gallery has a little of everything. It was built in 1872 and restored to its early-20th-century glory a few years ago. It’s not really how people do museums today, but wow, is it beautiful.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

photos: me

I’m posting with the free WiFi at BWI:

Thanks, Google! Ok, I only logged on to do this post, so really I’m not using it. But if I were here for a long time (rather than rushing to finish before they call my row for boarding), I’m sure I’d appreciate it.

UPDATE, 5 minutes later: Heyyy, it reaches out to the airplane! Ok, ok, I’m turning it off now. Sheesh.

I never got around to writing about a lot of my adventures in Germany, partly because I was having trouble uploading pictures to Wordpress. So, I guess you’re in luck, ’cause I figured that out.

When my parents came and visited at the end of my stay, we took a week and went down to poke around Bavaria. Our first stop was Berchtesgaden, a lovely alpine resort town and one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite places. For his 50th birthday, the Nazis built a mountain retreat for him on a crag with 360-degree views. Hitler, according to my guidebook, had vertigo and hated it there.

The building survived – unusual for Nazi sites – and is now a major tourist destination. Buses run up the winding road all day, and there’s a restaurant up top.

The day we went up it was super cloudy and you couldn’t see the views. My dad and I went on a little hike on a trail that climbed up and down the rocks and wound around, with what should have been fantastic views of the alps.

It felt exactly like the beginning of the second Lord of the Rings movie, when Frodo and Sam are trying to find their way through the rocks of Emyn Muil. Spooky.

Last Friday evening, one of Norway’s national broadcast stations showed a documentary called “Bergensbanen minutt for minutt” – “Bergen Line, Minute for Minute.” It was a seven-hour-long documentary showing, in real time, the train trip from Bergen to Oslo. Seven hours. And 16 minutes. Of train. According to NRK, 176,000 people sat in front of the TV for the whole thing and another 1.2 million dropped in for part of it. (That’s about one in four Norwegians.) The train goes through 182 tunnels on the way; during those bits, they edited in historic clips from the railway.

Missing out on the Bergensbane was the great disappointment of my last trip to Norway. I was so excited to take this train. It’s supposed to be one of the most beautiful train rides in the world; it goes from sea level in Bergen to sea level in Oslo, passing over the highlands on the way. The high point is 4,060 feet above sea level. But a couple of days before my ride I saw a picture on the front of the Bergen paper showing a derailed train lying in the snow. Uh-oh, I thought. I read the article and, yep. That was the Bergensbane, and it would be closed until they got those cars out of there.

So instead of a scenic seven-hour train ride over mountains and snow, I had a one-hour train ride – mostly through tunnels – to Voss, then a 5,000,000-hour bus ride to Oslo. The bus was full. The guy next to me wasn’t friendly. It was about the least pleasant transportation experience I’ve ever had in Norway, and I’m including the month in 1998 when the Trondheim city buses went on strike and I had to walk several miles to work.

The train documentary was such a big hit that they’re scrambling to get a DVD out in time for Christmas. I think they could sell that to train buffs all over the world, don’t you? Heck, I would watch it. I’m trying to get part 1 of the documentary to load on the NRK website right now.

Here are the articles from NRK: An Orgy for Train Lovers and A DVD of the Bergen Line is Coming!

photo: SRS scandiline

Hey, so all those people weren’t lying: The Grand Canyon is spectacular. We only had time for a day trip between the concerts in Phoenix and Las Vegas, but I’m told we picked the prettiest trail to go down. It’s the South Kaibab Trail. It goes down into the canyon along a little ridge, so you get 360-degree views. Wow. It was pretty. And since it’s a canyon, the trail goes down fast. It starts out like this:

and goes on like this:

We stopped for lunch at the little bump just left of the middle of that picture, which also turned out to be a prime spot for knitting.

Yes, I (1) carried a partly-finished sweater 1.5 miles into the Grand Canyon and (2) was still wearing the wristband from the concert two days earlier. The sweater pattern is here, if you want to recreate the experience.

You have to be really careful hiking in the canyon, since this is the opposite of your normal hike – rather than going up (a mountain, say) in the morning and down in the afternoon, we went down and then had to get back up. But we adopted the motto “If you can perceive movement, you’re doing it wrong” and walked really, really, really slowly on the way out. We felt great, and the hike back up only took about 20 more minutes than the hike down. It made me think I could actually handle doing the whole canyon someday. I mean, some *two* days. I’m not crazy. The park is full of signs telling you not to do it in one day, many using this example.

We often wished we had a geologist along. For example, what the heck is going on here? This is in limestone at the top of the canyon (in that first set of switchbacks dropping down into the canyon).