Photos from the Trip - California

Palm trees in front of the museum.

I have been back from California for a few days.  This trip we were traveling in the area between San Diego and Los Angeles.  On a previous trip we had spent time around Monterrey and Big Sur. There was so much to see.  The scenery is amazing and the parks were absolutely wonderful.  I think I could spend weeks on just this area.  We only had a week, so we packed as much into it as we could.  Today I finally had time to take a look at the pictures.  I took a lot of photos while I was there.  I'll share some of the highlights for the next couple of posts.

Saber tooth tiger skeleton.

Leaves and dirt disguise the perimeter of the tar pit.

The first place we headed was to the La Brea Tar Pits.  Our grandchildren had wanted to see it.  The tar pits are actually in downtown Los Angeles.  There is a park where you can walk around and see the tar pits.  Some are active and still bubbling tar.  Actually, tar is a misnomer.  The substance bubbling up is asphalt.  Tar is a product made from treating asphalt.  (However, asphalt pits just does not have the right ring to it, so it has been called the tar pits for a long time.)  But you can see the bubbles forming in the sticky tar in the pit. The place smells of asphalt and methane.  The active pits are fenced off so that no one can accidentally blunder into them.  Of course, some people will not be happy without somehow managing to get tar onto themselves.  I saw one orange cone that was covered in tar.  The cone carried a warning that there was tar on the cone, but you just know that someone had to touch it.  I am not sure what is removed tar, but I did not see any cleaner handy.  Whomever gets into that is going to be sticky for a while. 

Excavation in progress.

You would think from the smell of the pits that animals would avoid them.  It is easy to see how an animal could have blundered into the tar pits once you take a look at them though.  There is some water floating ton top of the tar, so it could have been used as a watering hole.  Much of the tar is covered over by leaves and floating dirt and debris.  In some places it looked like solid ground.  Some animal could easily have stepped onto it thinking it was still on dry land.

Other pits were dried up and had either been excavated in the past or were in the process of being excavated.  Excavations made early on were not as well treated as the archaeological digs of today.  The pits were dug out only trying to extract the large bones.  There were many tiny bones that had been cast aside because the people digging were looking only for what brought quick recognition as a dinosaur hunter.  The slag from those early digs are now being revisited and are revealing thousands of small bones, shells, and teeth.

Removing a mammoth tusk from rock.

There is also a museum on site. There was also a 3-D movie.  There is a fee for both the La Brea tar pits and the movie.  The museum houses the fossils and educational exhibits.  There were more or less complete fossilized skeletons, skulls, and other bones of saber tooth tigers, llamas, the extinct American horse, a mammoth, and many other species.  The most skulls found there were from wolves.  The had found about four hundred.  The movie explained that it was thought that predator animals such as saber tooth tigers and wolves would jump onto the animals stuck in the mud and try to eat them.  Then at some point the predator slipped and fell into the tar, becoming stuck themselves.

The museum has an glass enclosed laboratory where they work on fossils.  Although there was no one in it while we were there, we could see work that was in progress. A sign by a huge mammoth tusk invited you to watch the progress as they laboriously scrapped away the rock from it bit by bit, slowly revealing the tusk within.  Or perhaps this was plaster surrounding the tusk that was used to stabilize it during transport.  I am not clear on that particular point.

One of the educational exhibits had a place where you could try to pull a cylinder roughly the size of an animal leg out of the tar.  It was sealed so that you could not actually come into contact with the tar.  There was a small handle for children and a larger handle for adults.  I could hardly pull the smaller one out.  The large one was very difficult to pull free from the tar.  You just don't really understand how sticky this stuff really is until you try it.