Trove Of Fossils Uncovered At LACMA Site

[Bianca]

                                        Trove of Fossils Uncovered at LACMA Site




 
 
Feb. 18, 2009
 LOS ANGELES

—Archaeologists in Los Angeles have discovered the largest known deposit of fossils from the last ice age under an old parking garage near the city's La Brea Tar Pits, the Los Angeles Times reports.

The area, first excavated from 1906 to 1914, is known for its archaeological richness; petroleum from underground oil fields oozed to the surface over thousands of years, forming bogs that trapped and killed and ultimately preserved wildlife there.

The most significant of this round of finds is a nearly intact skeleton of a Columbian mammoth that would have stood 10 feet high. Researchers have also found some 700 plant and animal specimens so far, including a saber-tooth-cat skeleton, a giant ground sloth, a North American lion, turtles, fish, gophers, snails, and plant material.

“This gives us the opportunity to get a detailed picture of what life was like 10,000 to 40,000 years ago” in the Los Angeles Basin, said John Harris, chief curator at the George C. Page Museum, which is conducting the research. The find will make the museum “the major library of life in the Pleistocene ice age,” he said.

The site belongs to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Page's sister museum, which has razed an above-ground parking garage there to build an underground parking facility and restore parkland.

The dig is significant because researchers are using new extraction methods, loading huge chunks of soil into containers that can be sifted through offsite, allowing construction to proceed. Done conventionally, the dig would have taken 20 years.



http://www.archaeologynews.org/link.asp?ID=395687&Title=Trove%20of%20Fossils%20Uncovered%20at%20LACMA%20Site