From the Los Angeles Times:
Workers excavating an underground garage on the site of an old May Co. parking structure in Los Angeles’ Hancock Park got more than just a couple hundred new parking spaces. They found the largest known cache of fossils from the last ice age, an assemblage that has flabbergasted paleontologists.
Researchers from the George C. Page Museum at the La Brea tar pits have barely begun extracting the fossils from the sandy, tarry matrix of soil, but they expect the find to double the size of the museum’s collection from the period, already the largest in the world.
Among their finds, to be formally announced today, is the nearly intact skeleton of a Columbian mammoth—named Zed by researchers—a prize discovery because only bits and pieces of mammoths had previously been found in the tar pits.
According to the story, “Zed” is being cleaned in the Page Museum’s “fishbowl,” which means I’m gonna go gawk at it tomorrow.
The paleocontractors doing the excavating have a blog. You can see photos of one of them woman-handling an intact American lion (Panthera atrox) skull here.
[Updated] In other Breaking La Brea Tar Pits News,* researchers have isolated new species of bacteria and archaea living in—and off—the asphaltum in the Rancho La Brea seeps. These extremophile organisms possess the ability to metabolize the tar, and biotech developers are eyeing the microbes for environmental cleanup potential. I’m hoping for a spray application that will dissolve big knobby tires.
* How many redundancies can you spot here? The answer may scare you.
How freaking cool is that? Mr B. wanted to go to LA this weekend anyway….
Just only three 3.
New additional update quatro four!
The word excavatrix is so freaking cool! Makes dominatrix look like a pussy.
You dig that, Arvind?
In spades! Definitely my pick for word of the day!
i grew up in LA, and don’t think i ever visited the tar pits as a kid. even though my mother once worked at a department store down the street. [mom was not into museums or science. she figured it was all covered by the odd trip to the zoo, which was closer to home.]
but in college, i was part of a group mentoring/tutoring kids on the east side, so we took them! and my own kids got to go, too. we were pretty amazed at all of it: the bones, the history, the tar seeping out of the ground, how all this could be in the middle of a city, etc.
Ah, I see. It’s probably too much to hope that this was a previously undiscovered tar pit… because the Spaniards and perhaps the natives burned off the top, oh, 10,000 years’ worth of specimens a couple of hundred years ago. It would be so nice if we could find detailed traces of recent evolution and climate!