Speaker: James Lowery --- Former Director of Management Support Services, University of Birmingham and previous Scientech Club speaker on Antarctica and the Wetumpka meteor impact crater. (Email: JLowery2@gmail.com) (Sponsored By: Dr. Alan Dale Schmidt)(ID: 1878)
This presentation will describe the La Brea Tar Pits and the George C. Page Museum which is located in an urban public park in Los Angeles. Mr Lowery's visits to the tar pits included a “behind the scenes” tour including the processing lab and the active excavations. His presentation will include information about the many types of Ice Age fossils that have been and continue to be extracted from the active asphalt formations and seeps at the park. There have been over 3.5 million fossils collected from the tar pits that are in the Page Museum collection. Views will include the representative fossils on display inside the museum.
Program: Live and Zoom: La Brea Tar Pits: “The World’s Only Ongoing Urban Ice Age Excavations"
Speaker: James Lowery, former Director of Management Support Services, University of Birmingham. Previous Scientech Club speaker on Antarctica and the Wetumpka meteor impact crater.
Introduced By: Alan Schmidt
Attendance: NESC: 101, Zoom: 26
Guest(s): Holly Day, Norma Erickson, Lin Simmons and two not recorded.
Scribe: Bill Dick
Editor: Carl Warner
View a Zoom recording of this talk at: Today's program 10142024
The term La Brea is taken from the Spanish land grant name – La Brea, which is the Spanish name for “Tar.” James Lowery has spoken to the Club before. He worked at the University of Alabama.
There are a few other tar pits, but the La Brea is the world’s largest ice-age ongoing excavation site. It is located in Hancock Park, a public park in LA, which is a large city block square. Adjacent to the site is the Page Museum, which houses many tar pit specimens, both plant and animal. Many areas are fenced off to prevent any contamination with the asphalt.
The material is not tar, which is man-made, but asphalt, a hardened mixture of stones and oil. Northern Alabama and eastern Tennessee also have asphalt sites. Asphalt is a great preservative. It colors some of the bones.
The La Brea research is ongoing. Local college students sift through the asphalt searching for old objects, including micro fossils, such as beetles and pollen grains. The tar fields are a thousand feet deep, but the top 40 feet contain animal specimens. The objects date from 55,000 to 10,000 years ago. Over 3 million specimens have been recovered. Over 600 species of plants and animals have been found.
Methane gas bubbles up through the tar. It is caused by bacteria. Fossils are found in the hardened asphalt, not in the liquid. One human remain was found in 1914. The female was about 18 years old and died over 10,000 years ago.
Animals found in the Tar Pits include birds (over 10,000 eagle bones are in one box), saber tooth cats, ground sloths, dire wolves (larger than the grey wolf), camels, horses, bison, coyotes, snakes, turtles and 45,000 mollusks. Animals still get stuck in the asphalt, such as birds and squirrels.
The area smells of asphalt, especially the work areas. The exhibition is funded with LA city money and grants from foundations. Many photos of the area were shown, some of them over 100 years old. Current photos show workers lifting specimens from the asphalt.
See also: https://tarpits.org/
James Lowery
