The La Brea Tar Pits

Today we started off the day by dropping Gunner off at a kennel. It took us an hour to go the 5 miles to get there, and another hour(or so) to get 15 miles downtown. The upside was that we ended up driving the back roads through Beverly Hills and we saw a bunch of expensive looking mansions.

We were on our way to the La Brea Tar Pits. About 2 weeks ago, I started learning about them in my online earth science class. I knew we would be close so I asked if we could go there if we had time, and we had time, so we went there! There is a large public park downtown that most of the tar pits were in. We also went to the museum there that was free, we happened to hit it on the free first Tuesday of the month. My mom and dad was very happy about that.

So in these tar pits, tar has been bubbling out of the ground and it carries lots of ancient fossils in it. Different animals that are now extinct that can be found here are saber tooth tigers, wooly mammoths, dire wolves, Bison, large sloths and more but sadly no dinosaurs. We got to watch paleontologists work on the fossils. In one area, they were sorting tiny fossils from sand using a tweezers and a microscope.

Outside we saw more working tar pits where paleontologists were uncovering more fossils by slowly digging out the tar from the fossils in the pit. In other tar pits we could actually see bubbles surfacing. The tar is the same temp as the air, so when it’s cold out you can walk on it(animals can that is). The way that all these fossils got into the tar is that the animals like wooly mammoths would go into the tar, get stuck and then die. Then the predators like dire wolves would think it was an easy meal, but end up getting stuck in there too.

This the only area in the world that is like this. It’s crazy that it is downtown LA! Adjacent to Park was the LA County Art Museum with some funky public art spaces. And across the street was a line of food trucks. We had a “little lunch” of buffalo chicken mac and cheese, mango sweet rice tacos and a creme brûlée donut that we shared.

Use your imagination to guess how long it took us to get home that night. Maybe if I meet you one day, I will tell you. (WT)