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1964. Small tar pit. The La Brea Tar Pits is an active paleontological research site in urban Los Angeles. Hancock Park was formed around a group of tar pits where natural asphalt (also called asphaltum, bitumen, or pitch; brea in Spanish) has seeped up from the ground for tens of thousands of years.
- La Brea Woman
La Brea Woman was a human whose remains were found in the La...
- Carpinteria Tar Pits
The Carpinteria Tar Pits are located in the southeastern...
- McKittrick Tar Pits
The pits are the most extensive asphalt lakes in the state....
- Saber-Toothed Cat
The abundance of Smilodon skeletons in the La Brea tar pits...
- American Lion
Panthera atrox, better known as the American lion, also...
- Binagadi Asphalt Lake
Skeleton of Rhinoceros binagadiensis (Pleistocene), which...
- Salt Lake Oil Field
The field is also notable as being the source, by long-term...
- Dire Wolves
The dire wolf (Aenocyon dirus / iː ˈ n ɒ s aɪ. ɒ n ˈ d aɪ r...
- La Brea Woman
The La Brea tar pits (or Rancho La Brea) are a famous cluster of tar pits in central Los Angeles. Complete skeletons of many thousands of large animals have been found here. They date mostly from 40,000 to 8,000 years ago. Hancock Park was formed around the tar pits, in the heart of Los Angeles. Asphalt or tar ( brea in Spanish) has seeped up ...
- Not Tar... Asphalt. Asphalt bubbling up from below ground at the La Brea Tar Pits pond. Los Angeles Almanac Photo. To be clear: the La Brea Tar Pits are not actually composed of tar at all.
- Only A Few Inches Deep. Smilodon californicus (Saber-Tooth Cat) and Canis dirus (Dire Wolf) fight over a Mammuthus columbi (Columbian Mammoth) carcass in the La Brea Tar Pits.
- Asphalt is an Amazing Preservative. La Brea Tar Pits lab worker cleans asphalt from a 40,000-year-old bison bone. Los Angeles Almanac Photo. Asphalt is not easily removed from fossil remains, as La Brea Tar Pits paleontologists can tell you, but skeletal remains encased in it are kept in pristine condition.
- No Dinosaur Fossils... Ice Age Fossils. Mural portraying Ice Age Los Angeles at La Brea Tar Pits & Museum. Los Angeles Almanac Photo. Fossils found in the La Brea Tar Pits only date from the very end of the Pleistocene epoch (also known as the Ice Ages), from 11,700 to 50,000 years ago, which still falls within our current Cenozoic Era.
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Paleobiota of the La Brea Tar Pits. La Brea Tar Pits fauna as depicted by Charles R. Knight. A list of prehistoric and extinct species whose fossils have been found in the La Brea Tar Pits, located in present-day Hancock Park, a city park on the Miracle Mile section of the Mid-Wilshire district in Los Angeles, California.
The extinct animals discovered at La Brea Tar Pits were trapped in the asphalt between 11,000 to 50,000 years ago. They may have lived in the Los Angeles region for much of the last 100,000 years. Before that time the Los Angeles Basin was covered by the Pacific Ocean.
Right in the heart of L.A. sits the world’s most powerful gateway to the Ice Age. The asphalt seeps at La Brea Tar Pits are the only active urban fossil dig site in the world. Plants and animals from the last 50,000 years are discovered here every day. Outside, you can watch excavators carve fossils out of the asphalt.
Tar pits form when crude oil seeps to the surface through fissures in the Earth's crust; the light fraction of the oil evaporates, leaving behind the heavy tar, or asphalt, in sticky pools. Tar from the La Brea tar pits was used for thousands of years by local native Americans, as a glue and as waterproof caulking for baskets and canoes.
