A Century of Finding Awesome Dead Things at the La Brea Tar Pits

Today marks the 100th anniversary of excavation at the famous La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. Since 1913, scientists have unearthed quite literally an entire menagerie of animals and plants from the Ice Age, giving us a greater understanding of life on Earth as we’ve never known it.

As an East Coaster, my only exposure to the La Brea Tar Pits is through My Girl 2. But ever since I caught a glimpse of it in that movie, I have been fascinated by the mere existence of the site: a prehistoric death trap that is slowly surrendering the immense depths of its morbid secrets to contemporary scientists.

Over the last century, over a million fossils have been found, the most common of which has been that of the dire wolf, a Pleistocene carnivore who felt the crush of extinction around 10,000 years ago. Approximately 4,000 individual dire wolves are represented in the La Brea fossil collection. Next up are the saber-tooth cats, with 2,000 individuals, followed by coyotes, with an unspecified amount.

And yet, La Brea is perhaps most famous not for its canine and feline specimens, but for the mammoths, those almost mythological ancestors of the modern elephant. Up until the last decade, mammoth fossils had only been discovered scattered around the site in pieces.

But in 2006, with the accidental discovery of a new and plentiful fossil source, La Brea researchers stumbled upon the most complete mammoth skeleton to date: an 80 percent intact individual they affectionately named Zed.

Zed was found during the excavation of Project 23, an impressive repository of fossils only discovered, like so many weird things under our city streets, when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art began construction on an underground parking garage. Construction needed to continue, so in order to protect the fossils, the museum built 23 large boxes (hence the project's name) around 16 newly exposed fossil deposits and moved the boxes to safer terrain for exploration.

The contents of these boxes were so rich that the excavation of Pit 91, which had been going on in earnest for the last four decades, was halted in deference.

Visitors can stop by the Page Museum, which manages the excavation, to see what the past hundred years of probing has unveiled. But first, a caveat: while the idea of fossils often evokes images of dinosaurs before all else, no dinosaurs have ever been raised from the tar pits. According to the website of the museum, Los Angeles remained underwater at the time of the "terrible lizards." When the tar pits began ensnaring victims in its bubbly doom, it had been roughly 65 million years since the last dino traversed the earth.

Though it is and should always be primarily known for its revelatory fossil record, modern society has found another purpose for the tar: a place to discard evidence. Humanity, too, takes its place in La Brea's registry.

@heyiamlex