Major cache of fossils unearthed in L.A.

latimes ^ | Feb. 17, 2009 | Thomas H. Maugh II

[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.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks!

[Ditter]

Yes I know what they would have to do to drill in a neighborhood, I was just correcting your statement that a well takes a city block sized piece of land. It does not but then there must be someway to get the oil/gas from the well site. A pipeline for gas, which is expensive and destructive or big trucks to haul oil away. Either one of those are not going to happen in a settled neighborhood. For those of you who think drilling for oil/gas is a environmental nightmare, you are living in the past because it's not.

[PsyOp]

Who said is had to come out of the ground? Right off shore we have billions of gallons of easily accessible oil. Profitable even at current prices from what I understand. All the oil companies need is permission to get it. Which, of course, will never happen.

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

Who said is had to come out of the ground?

Well, that was the whole point--the oil that's immediately under the tar pits area. That's a good ten miles from the beach. You're not going to pull that oil with an offshore rig.

[Deb]

It was just Sharon Stone sunbathing.

[smokingfrog]

couldn't resist...