Let me take you to Los Angeles to the Ice Age – see it today

Here is a headline that appeared 369 days ago and I bet you missed it. Every day, paleontologists work at the Page Museum adjacent the La Brea tar pits right next to the Los Angeles Museum of Art discovering and cleaning new fossils. The public can watch them working. The juxtaposition of the tar pits on the same strip with Los Angeles most posh shopping and sophisticated art collection is striking. As an amateur paleontologist, I knew about this place as my father used to bring home items from the museum store to us in Ohio after his business trips to LA. Ohio fossils are considerably older, being Ordovician, Devonian, and Silurian from the ancient sea bottom. The tar pits are a bubbling mass of tar, a pit of petroleum. When a mammoth or other large animal mistook the pond for water, they would get stuck. Seeing this, predators would attack them to take advantage and some of them would get stuck. Soon, examples from the entire food chain would become stuck and eventually sink in the tar. The tar preserves the animals and therefore their fossil remains are in extraordinarily good condition. The Page Museum displays ancient panthers, dire wolves, bears, and sloths accompanied by a diorama that places them into historical context. Los Angeles is an active geographic region resting on fissures that result in earthquakes. Underneath, there are more bubbling masses like this one.