Le Brea Tar Pits

When we were in LA I really wanted to go to the La Brea Tar Pits.  I had heard about their Dire wolf collection and my favourite animal is the Dire wolf.  

Although the name sounds really exciting the La Brea Tar Pits aren't actually Tar Pits, they are Asphalt Seeps where large puddles of a sticky black substance called Asphalt has seeped up through cracks in the earth.  The reason they're so interesting is that over 10s of thousands of years lots of animals have become stuck in the Asphalt and died.  These include lots of extinct species like the Mammoth, the Sabre Tooth Cat and the Dire wolf.  So there are literally thousands of fossils in the museum and lots still in the seeps.  

This is an exercise where you had to try and pull up on a handle to free something from the tar.  It showed us just how sticky the tar was and we understood just how impossible it would have been for animals to escape it once they had stepped in it.

When we arrived we looked at some of the skeletons...

 A demonstrator even let us touch a replica of a Sabre tooth Cat Skull.  When we arrived we thought that Sabre Tooth Cats were called Sabre Tooth Tigers, but the demonstrator told us the proper name.

We learnt about teeth.  If a skull has sharp teeth that means the animal is a carnivore they need them for tearing through meat.  If a  skull has flat teeth that's an indication that the animal was a herbivore because it grinds the flat parts of it's teeth together to break up fibres in plants.  In other museums in London we have also been able to apply this knowledge when looking at other animal fossils.

I Ioved the Wooly Mamorth

And the hundreds of Dire Wolf Skulls!  

A really interesting part of the museum was the laboratory where the Paleontologists worked.  It was a round room with glass on every side so you could see in easily.

On display was a mouse toe bone and an elephant toe bone.  Even though they vary in size tremendously if you look at the mouse bone under a microscope you will see the SHAPE is nearly exactly the same.

These are claws from a saber-toothed cat.  In the past paleontologists believed that the claws were the same size on all of the toes.  But over time with new research methods they have realised they are different sizes going from large to small like our toes do.

Here are some of the tools used by the Palentologists.  There are old toothbrushes, ear buds, pencils, scissors and various brushes.  They also use a special acid to dissolve the asphalt.

They carefully sort and record the fossils they find.

This is one of the rooms where the thousands of fossils are carefully stored.

As you can see my little brother Patrick really liked the Mammoths.  And so did I!  I really had a great day and learnt lots of cool stuff.  It blew my mind how many fossils they found - especially when I saw the pits.  And how many they've still go to go.  (The collection is expected to double with just one of the new seeps they're working on called Project 23.)   

The asphalt seeps really are a unique place where nature has captured thousands of years worth of natural history.