LOL the great looking but mostly inaccurate metal sculptures at the pits notwithstanding.
Posted on 02/17/2009 10:55:33 PM PST by smokingfrog
Workers excavating an underground garage on the site of an old May Co. parking structure in Los Angeles' Hancock Park got more than just a couple hundred new parking spaces. They found the largest known cache of fossils from the last ice age, an assemblage that has flabbergasted paleontologists.
Researchers from the George C. Page Museum at the La Brea tar pits have barely begun extracting the fossils from the sandy, tarry matrix of soil, but they expect the find to double the size of the museum's collection from the period, already the largest in the world.
Among their finds, to be formally announced Wednesday, is the nearly intact skeleton of a Columbian mammoth -- named Zed by researchers -- a prize discovery because only bits and pieces of mammoths had previously been found in the tar pits.
But researchers are perhaps even more excited about finding smaller fossils of tree trunks, turtles, snails, clams, millipedes, fish, gophers and even mats of oak leaves. In the early 1900s, the first excavators at La Brea threw out similar items in their haste to find prized animal bones, and crucial information about the period was lost.
"This gives us the opportunity to get a detailed picture of what life was like 10,000 to 40,000 years ago" in the Los Angeles Basin, said John Harris, chief curator at the Page. The find will make the museum "the major library of life in the Pleistocene ice age," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
One could say the same for DC by there they ain’t below the ground.
There are no fossils — just clever legerdemain by either God or Satan to confuse the unbelievers and/or confirm the eeevil athiests.
Proof reading is my friend
One could say the same for DC but there they ain’t below the ground.
Yeah, honest politicians.
ping.
...and common sense.
It greives me to live in Ca right now. But I have one son going into his senior year in HS and 2.5 years until I can take early retirement. On top of that I’m in the defense industry and starting to get nervous about this new thugocracy we have. And with the exception of my 401k turning into crap the wife and I are enjoying the best financial years of our working lives right now. Ain’t that the chits!
Given the state of "art" in today's social and political circles, the need for another parking lot for a museum that only rarely shows graffiti (L.A.s signature art form), and the value of findings that will be lost due to hasty (salvage) archeology;
this just ain't right.
What were Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd doing there?
LOL the great looking but mostly inaccurate metal sculptures at the pits notwithstanding.
“Major cache of fossils unearthed in LA”
Yeah, it’s called Hollywood.
Mostly inaccurate? I'll be bringing my kids there shortly. Is there a link that details the inaccuracies or something specific to tell them? Just curious...
Don't forget the one over in Berkley!
Let me be the first....
From the article:
“...In 3 1/2 months, working seven days a week,
she and her colleagues removed the entire collection
two years ago and delivered them to the museum...”
- - -
Two years ago?
News moves slowly out there, I guess.
You chance to jump in and tell is how it can’t be 40,000 years but it has to be less than 6,000 years.
This explains the huge pile of wooden boxes with markings that indicated “finds” that I saw in back of the museum a few months back. I always find that block of museums interesting. Along the regular sidewalks in back of the museums, the tar cracks through the surface in many spots - a reminder that it’s not just in the big pool in front of the block!
If they were smart, they would look for oil at the site and forget the fossils.
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