Message #58015

[Valerie]

Rancho La Brea tar pits

These pits in the heart of Los Angeles are one of the richest sources of fossils discovered to date. More than 565 species all somehow got stuck in the tar (asphalt to be precise) over tens of thousands of years, fossilising all the time. Well, that’s what the experts at the George C. Page Museum would have us believe, but they fail to explain the incredible density of animals that “got stuck” there. During the first University of California excavations in 1906, they found a “bed of bones” which contained over seven hundred sabre-toothed tiger skulls. These combined with wolf skulls averaged twenty per cubic yard.[15] Almost more bones than tar. They are not the bones of animals that merely got stuck and waited to die. They are “broken, mashed, contorted and mixed in a most heterogeneous mass”[16], just like in the muck of Alaska. And we mustn’t overlook the fossilised birds that have been dug up, 100,000 of them, including over 138 species, 19 of which are extinct. The George C. Page Museum suggests that the 3,000 birds that are predators and scavengers may have been attempting to feed on other trapped animals, when they themselves got stuck. As sensible as this idea sounds, it fails to explain the presence of the further 97,000 birds that were non-carnivorous. Or three species of fish!

At the end of the last ice age (circa 10,000 BC) many North American species became extinct, including: mammoths, camels, Pre-Columbian horses, ground sloths, peccaries, antelopes, elephants, rhinoceroses, giant armadillos, tapirs, sabre-toothed tigers and giant bison. All of these animals are relatively large. Did they all become trapped in pits of asphalt? Was it the warmer weather that killed them? If so, could they not have shifted north?

Or were they wiped out by a terrible catastrophe?

Frozen Mammoths

"Fossil bones are astonishingly abundant in frozen ground of Alaska, but articulated

• bones are scarce, and complete skeletons, except for rodents that died in their burrows, are almost unknown … the dispersal of the bones is as striking as their abundance and indicates general destruction of soft parts prior to burial."[17]

Meanwhile in Siberia, mammoths were being wiped out in a similar manner. Massive graveyards of their remains have been mined for ivory tusks. It has been estimated that more than half a million tons of mammoth tusks were buried along Siberia’s Arctic coastline[18], which equates to roughly five million mammoths. Several dozen frozen mammoth carcasses have been found with the flesh still intact. They died suddenly. In their stomachs can be found undigested vegetation, including grass, bluebells, wild beans and buttercups[19] – food typically available in the summer. Scientists examining them have concluded that three of the mammoths died of asphyxiation. The cause of death of the others has not been determined.

Regardless of cause, they froze within days of dying, and when unfrozen the flesh has been fresh enough to feed to dogs. With the previous pole positioned at Hudson Bay (see below), the North Siberian coastline would have had the same latitude as Japan does today, well outside of the Arctic Circle. But when the poles shifted, the climate would have rapidly changed, from a summer savannah where mammoths munched on buttercups, to a frozen wasteland.

But wait a minute; weren’t the woolly mammoths suited to living in a cold climate? They are described as woolly due to their hairy coat, but this is only hair, greaseless hair. To help protect them from the cold, all of today’s Arctic mammals have glands that make their hair oily to retain warmth – the mammoths had no such gland. Although thicker, a mammoth’s hair is the same as that of elephants, and they live in the tropical regions. Many animals found in equatorial jungles also have thick hair, the tiger being one such example. Anyone still unconvinced could consider this - bones of tigers, rhinoceroses and antelope were found alongside the mammoths, and these are obviously not Arctic creatures.