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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.
Photos: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
