Today was an interesting day at the La Brea Tar Pits. I had no idea Brea in Spanish meant tar... learned quite a bit today. The museum was also open and there were alot of skeletons that have been dug out of the tar, cleaned up and assembled to for which ever animal that fell into the pit. I was amazed that from 1913-1915, there were about 500,000 skeletons that were discovered... and that lions and saber-tooth cats once roamed California!
Mammoths were plenty back in the day. Some weighed as much as 10,000 pounds and could get stuck in just one inch of tar or asphalt as it's mostly called now.
The tar is not what usually killed the animals that were trapped. It was mostly exposure, dehydration and starvation that killed them. Then other scavenger animals would try to eat these trapped animals and also get stuck. The most common animal the paleontologists have found are dire wolves. Inside the museum, they had a wall of 400 skulls on display out of the 1600 skulls that have been found to date. Each skull was different in shape and size - there were some pretty big wolves!
I was surprised to see the level of the tar pit had gone down. You can see along the tar lake the recession is about a foot more shallow. What was even more interesting was that around the park there were coned off areas with tar coming out of the ground. The tar itself is not hot, but bubbles from the methane and H2S gas that is released from the ground. It kind of reminded me of going to Yellowstone National Park.
This is called area 91. It's an actual area that is used every summer to dig up more skeletons. You can see the flags where there are some bones. Usually, 3-4 squares are dug up every summer. It is a long process but also it's up to the museum funding and they can only afford 3-4 squares per year.
Back in the early 1900's, people would use kerosene to clean the tar off themselves since it's so sticky.
Also, in the park were these baskets of plants. I just discovered the word hydroponics a few weeks ago as I drove past at least a half dozen hydroponic/ aquaponic shops on a different route home from work. Curious as to what these shops were, I googled information off the Internet. Very interesting stuff! You don't even need soil to grow vegetables! In these baskets were various vegetable plants - tomato, various lettuce, squash, corn... perhaps this is the future of personal home gardening. The plants are put in gravel and water is constantly flowing to water these plants. At the bottom there is a basin to catch the water and a pump to keep recycling the water.
