Scientists make major fossil find near La Brea Tar Pits

Scientists at the La Brea Tar Pits have found the largest known cache of fossils from the last ice age. KPCC's Steve Julian spoke with Shelly Cox, a researcher at the George Page Museum at the Tar Pits, about the discovery and its importance.

Shelly Cox: Well, it's pretty amazing find. We have 16 new deposits of bones, and then a almost complete mammoth skeleton. So it's pretty exciting.

Steve Julian: Tell us how you found it.

Cox: Well, in the course of demolishing and then rebuilding a parking structure just adjacent to the park, we had a fossil monitor out there watching, because this is the largest deposit of ice age fossils anywhere in the world.

So sure enough, there wasn't a street sign to tell the saber-toothed cats, and mammoths, and giant lions that they weren't supposed to cross that street, and they stopped the backhoe numerous times.

We used some new techniques to collect these fossils. Rather than spending years carefully documenting and collecting them on the site, they outlined the edge of the deposit and then dug big trenches around it, and basically crated it in place, and then had a giant crane lift out these whole tar pit deposits in big boxes.

Julian: Tell us about Zed.

Cox: Well, Zed is our big Columbian mammoth. It's probably about 80 percent complete, which is something brand new for us. In the past, the mammoth that we've had has just been isolated bones of many different individuals jumbled together, whereas Zed was kind of off to the side from the other deposits, and for what we have so far cleaned in the lab, he's bigger than any of the ones we had before.

Julian: What else did you find, besides the mammoth?

Cox: Well, besides the mammoth, so far in these large boxes we have recovered bones of the very large North American lion, several saber-toothed cat skulls, I think four or five dire wolf skulls, some of the kind of uncommon little dwarf pronghorn antelope.

So we're not finding any, like, brand new animals, but we are finding some of the ones that are not as common. One of the interesting things here at the tar pits is not only do we find the bones of these big animals, but at the same time they were getting stuck, little animals were also becoming mired in the asphalt.

So, these are the little creatures that lived right here in Hancock Park. You know, a bison probably migrated. A saber-toothed cat could have lived in the Hollywood Hills or Beverly Hills. Whereas, when we find the vertebrae of a lizard, we know that little lizard probably spent his whole life right here.

So this is where our information about the environment comes from. The tar pits are just really a treasure trove in looking at the climate and rainfall and so forth for ice age times.

Julian: Shelly Cox is a researcher at the George Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits. Have fun with this.

Cox: Oh, we are! Thank you!