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Wishing everyone a Happy Thanksgiving with this small bird wishbone (furcula) recently found in Box 14!

Check out the new excavator tour, plus other updates on www.tarpits.org!

And no, this blog is not affiliated with the Page Museum in any way. I just freaking love this place.

Observation Pit

Re-opening this summer after 20 years. You can only see

Observation Pit

Re-opening this summer after 20 years. You can only see it on the new Excavator Tour, which is free with Page Museum admission!

Architect Harry Sims Bent began his career with the firm Bertram Goodhue and worked on L.A. Central Library, various buildings at Caltech, and received praise for his aesthetically sensitive work in Hawaii (Honolulu Academy of Arts, Ala Moana Beach Park, Univ. of Hawaii). Bent settled stateside in Pasadena following WWII, partnered with Millard Sheets, and worked on some interesting county projects which included the L.A. County Arboretum and the restoration of the Reid Adobe and Baldwin Cottage. He was hired to design the Observation Pit, which opened to the public in 1952.

In the original design for the Observation Pit, the upper section of the south-facing portion of the circular wall was open to the outside, and the skylights (the fixtures themselves) didn't exist, although the circular openings were present. Because of vandalism to the fossils, panels with drawings and text replaced the windows; and skylights were affixed. Although staged (a la 1950s interpretation), the Observation Pit contains mostly real bones, including those of saber-toothed cats, ground sloths, and dire wolves.

It was the only museum in the area in the '50s, and certainly the only fossil museum in the park until 1977, when the George C. Page Museum opened. Our archives contain correspondence between paleontologist Chester Stock, Bent, County officials and engineers, and landscape architects including R. D. Cornell and even the then-aging (now iconic) horticulturalist Theodore Payne, who advocated lush, woodsy Pleistocene grounds. All had different ideas about what the parks should be.

The Observation Pit remained open, but stopped being staffed in the mid-1990s -- programming and tours centered around the Page Museum and Pit 91, primarily because the interpretation of the science had shifted from a staged setting in the 1950s to linking the visitor experience in situ with real time discoveries of Pit 91 and the Fossil Lab inside the museum. This year, in an effort to activate an indoor/outdoor circuit (through the park and into the museum), we're re-staffing Pit 91 with excavators, after hiatus due to demands of Project 23, once again for the summer season and we are re-opening the Observation Pit as a stop on the daily "Excavator Tour" -- representing our cultural and scientific past, present and future.

I am so excited for this! Next time I am in LA I have to come see this!

As currently exposed in Box 14, this coyote atlas (second neck vertebra) is sitting on top of a dire wolf maxilla (upper jaw) with the dire wolf's canine going right through the space for the coyote's spinal cord. It's a great example of how our fossils at Rancho La Brea are most often found “tangled” together. This results from the bones of many different animals being mixed together after becoming ensnared in the asphalt. The mixing may be the result of trampling and of movement of the asphalt and may take place over thousands of years. This, of course, means that the coyote wasn't necessarily the dire wolf's presumed dinner.

It's time to glop! We were back in Pit 91 last week to remove the continually seeping liquid asphalt.

At the George C. Page Museum (aka the La Brea Tar Pits), routine maintenance of Pit 91, the last remaining excavation site that is also still an active asphalt seep, is being carried out. Called "glopping," it involves getting down and dirty in the tar to keep it and water runoff from reburying the bones in the pit.

Now that SVP is over, we are back to digging in Box 14. One significant discovery from the past couple days is this fragment of a juvenile horse mandible. We recovered another fragment of a very young horse mandible in Box 14 last January in an adjacent grid and it is most likely that they are from the same individual. So far in Box 14 we have juvenile representatives of mastodon, camel, dwarf pronghorn, dire wolf and horse.

This is an image of a section of millipede that was excavated in box 1 from hard asphaltic sandy matrix. Upon close inspection, some of its tiny legs are still attached to its body and may even be complete (see lower section of image).