Gallery: Tar Pit Tour: The Ice Age Miracle From Miracle Mile
01paleontological-miracle-on-miracle-mile
LOS ANGELES – Twenty thousand years ago, give or take a few millennia, an enormous mammoth with a bad back, a misshapen tusk and a weird lump on his jaw wandered into a tar pit on what is now the Miracle Mile shopping district. It was one of those Darwinian twists of fate, an ignoble end to a noble animal that led a hard life and died before his time. But even as that old rogue bull struggled against his inevitable end, all around him life went on. Saber-tooth cats and dire wolves hunted. Bison and camel grazed. Birds of every description flew overhead. All of this unfolded exactly where Trevor Valle works at the George C. Page Museum. He knows this because he’s helping sort through one of the largest known caches of bones from the last ice age, meticulously cataloging animals that once roamed the very spot where he sits each day. “Right where my desk is, there could have been a throwdown between dire wolves and a sloth,” says Valle, who so loves the Page that he had its logo tattooed on his arm even before he worked there. He smiles, then adds, “My job is so rad.” For more than a century, scientists have been excavating fossils from the La Brea tar pits and cataloging them at the Page Museum. It's a paleontological treasure chest, a snapshot of the late Pleistocene and Ice Age California. That picture is growing sharper by the day as a team of paleontologists digs ever deeper into Project 23, a huge cache uncovered almost six years ago during the excavation of what would become a parking garage. *__Above__: The Rancho La Brea tar pits are composed of heavy oil fractions called asphaltum. Even today, crude oil still seeps up through the Sixth Street Fault to the surface, forming large pools within Hancock Park. It looks like melted chocolate and smells like hot asphalt.*
02meeting-zed
Even now, researchers are barely halfway through the 23 massive boxes of earth hastily carted away during construction of the L.A. County Museum of Art Parking garage. The cache, drawn from 16 individual deposits, is among the largest Ice Age-era discoveries of the past century. It contains the remains of more than 90 species ranging from saber-toothed cats to turtles to millipedes. But the star of the show is a nearly intact Columbian mammoth the staff has named Zed. He’s a major prize, because until he came along, only bits and pieces of mammoths had been pulled from the pits. “Zed is ridiculously important,” Valle says. “It’s the first articulated and associated mammoth we’ve found here. It was pretty incredible.” Valle and his crew have learned a lot about ol’ Zed by studying his bones. They know, for example, that he was a rogue bull between 47 and 51 years old. He stood 10 feet tall at the hip, weighed 18,000 pounds and had a pair of tusks 10 feet long. *__Above__: Researchers have almost finished freeing Zed's skull from the matrix of sand and tar that preserved it.*
03a-mammoth-jigsaw-puzzle
Before Zed's tusks came along, the Page had only bits and pieces of mammoth tusks. Not one piece was larger than a football. One of Zed's tusks is misshapen, evidence of the hard life he led. He’d broken at least three ribs, and he had “a weird growth” on his jaw. A few vertebra in his lower back had fused, too. “He could not move his lower back,” Valle says. “He was probably in constant low-level pain.” Inside the museum, researchers work behind the 60-foot-wide window of the “fish bowl,” carefully cleaning and cataloging the thousands of fossils that have been uncovered during Project 23. They’re slowing assembling a jigsaw puzzle. They’ve sifted through almost all of Zed’s bones, and have only his skull and two massive tusks to complete. He’s almost all there, too: Only his right rear leg, portions of his front limbs and a few minor pieces are unaccounted for. A chunk of his skull was also lost to the backhoe that first discovered him. The 34 mammoths removed from the La Brea between 1906 and 1914 were a jumble of bones, and those displayed in the Page Museum are a hodgepodge of remains from different animals. *__Above__: Zed's skeleton and other bones are prepared in the museum's "fishbowl" prep room, providing museum visitors with front-row seats.*
04csi-la-brea
Given that Zed is missing a few pieces, the Page probably won’t mount him. Rather, they’re thinking about displaying Zed pretty much as they found him, providing visitors with a lesson in taphonomy – the study of how organisms decay and become fossils. “It’s like CSI La Brea,” Valle says. “We can look at a single individual and see how it all went down.”
05thinking-inside-the-box
Project 23 is named for the number of massive boxes pulled from the site and hauled to the Page. There were 16 deposits on the site, and it would typically take years to excavate them -- but the city wanted them cleared immediately. The museum cribbed from arborists a technique used to move trees: They dug deep trenches around the deposits, then lifted them into enormous boxes. The boxes were moved onto the museum grounds, where they sit today behind a chain-link fence. Paleontologists have been digging into them -- so to speak -- ever since. They use dental picks, small chisels and, occasionally, hammers; progress is measured in grams of dirt removed and millimeters of fossil uncovered. Despite the slow pace, new discoveries come regularly. “It’s something no one’s ever seen before,” said Laura Tewksbury, who calls herself an “excavatrix.” “It’s cool to see things that have been preserved so well. It’s all so fresh.” [](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredscience/?attachment_id=97703) *__Above__: One of the 23 boxes, waiting to be opened.*
06the-entirety-of-ice-age-life
As cool as it is to find charismatic megafauna like Zed, paleontologists at the Page Museum get more excited about the smaller fossils – the turtles and mice, snails and centipedes, fish and ferns. Early excavators typically tossed such fossils aside in the hunt for bigger bones, but these small creatures provide a detailed snapshot of prehistoric life in the Los Angeles Basin. “The saber-tooth cats and the mammoth are great, but it’s the microfauna that really provides a look at what life was like here 10,000 or 20,000 years ago,” says Dr. John Harris, chief curator of the Page. “That sabertooth cat may have been simply passing through. But that field mouse lived here.” *__Above__: Dr. John Harris, chief curator of the Page Museum, photographs saber-tooth cat skulls as part of a study of skulls taken from Pit 61.*
0716000-fossils-and-counting
The largest of the boxes weighs 123,000 pounds, and the team is still digging through it. Bones emerge slowly but regularly: A saber-tooth cat rib. A dire wolf scapula. The tibia of a baby bison. The list goes on, longer than your arm. “We’ve pulled out 16,000 fossils and counting,” says lead excavator Carrie Howard. “It’s been filled with bone from the very top. It just keeps going.”
08a-discovery-a-day
It’s the same story with the other boxes. Tewksbury says excavators pulled 10,000 bones out of a single cubic meter of dirt in Box No. 1. Every day brings another discovery, and each researcher has a favorite. “The coolest thing I’ve found was an intact bird skull,” she says. “It hasn’t been identified yet.” About 1 million fossils were discovered at La Brea between 1906 and 1915, and the collection grew to 3.5 million in the years since. Project 23 may double that number, and Tewksbury said getting through all the boxes could take another decade. *__Above__: The 404 dire wolf skulls displayed in the Page Museum are among 1,600 found in the tar pits over the years.* [](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredscience/?attachment_id=97704) *__Above__: A California saber-tooth attacks a Harlan's ground sloth in a display at the Page Museum. The remains of both animals have been found among the tens of thousands of fossils recovered from Project 23.*
