Daddy Daycare Goes to La Brea Tar Pits

I had planned to take Cassius to the La Brea Tar Pits on a Friday. Corrie suggested that I invite his buddy Ari, and the arrangements were made.

As a child on trips from Sacramento to LA, we'd sometimes go to parks, like Disneyland, Knotts Berry Farm, and Universal Studios. But sometimes we'd do what my mom called "science trips", and go to Griffiths Observatory and the Tar Pits.

Now, it was my turn to show my own son this spot, the only Ice Age dig site being worked in an urban environment in the entire world. And here, we're not talking about some outskirts of a metro area: the site is on Wilshire Blvd a few short miles from downtown LA in a very tony neighborhood, full of beautiful homes that likely sell with at least seven spots in the price. The LACMA is on the west end of the grounds, and the newly finished Museum of Motion Picture Arts is on the north-west corner.

Above is one of the images that visitors will always hold onto. Outside the museum proper, on the grounds, is one of the largest natural asphalt pits surrounded by humans on earth. It shows the reality of what ancient animals would have witnessed: a tasty pond with a muddy bottom. Unfortunately for anyone who steps into the water, what looked like mud was actually asphalt, pure petroleum that's been pooling and mixing with other minerals. It looks like tar, even if technically it isn't.

An unsuspecting animal would go in for a cooling drink, and that was that. They'd get their stuck, and as they struggled, they would get themselves in deeper and deeper, and eventually die of thirst. Above not pictured were a baby mammoth and the other parent, anguishing onshore.

The museum building is an LA icon. LA, being so new, relatively, that iconic structures tend to be museums and opera houses. I guess that's not so different from other places, right?

Anyway, both kids are really into mammoths and saber-toothed cats, so the trip seemed like an easy homerun. I mean, really:

The following is the Columbian Mammoth, the largest mammoth, and possibly the largest proboscidean ever. Look how it towers over the boys:

These mammoths were not the wooly kind; those were smaller, but still mega fauna. The Columbian ones, though, holy cow:

An interesting fact about natural asphalt pits like the ones found here (if you own one of those houses nearby, don't dig too deep in your backyard!), is that the number of predator remains far outnumber the remains of prey or proboscideans. What would happen is something would get stuck and then start making a racket. A predator would show up, think there was an easy meal, and get themselves trapped. On and on it went, until predators outnumber prey something like 70 to 1.

They had an entire wall of dire wolf skulls:

The museum innards is a circle around an open air atrium in the center, and I'm sure it offers workers in the facility a respite during a workday.

On a walk around the grounds, one can see into the atrium from above, and the ferns help establish an ancient feel:

There were statues on the grounds, and the boys played on them appropriately. Strangely the work very similar matching outfits: synthetic material soccer jerseys. Cass wore one of Corrie's jerseys from Austin when she may have been ten; Ari wore a kids Denmark National team jersey.

In the giftshop, I saw stickers for Pit 91, like it was its own austere logo. As we explored the grounds after spending some money, we found Pit 91. There had been over a hundred pits located and excavated over the years, and all were named by their chronological order of study.

Pit 91 turned out to be the biggest repository of fossils in the whole place. Check out the chart below of what was found in Pit 91 up to this point:

The natural asphalt is a perfect preservation material, and because it works so well, so much information has been retained. the years from about 45,000 years back to about 14,000 years back is pretty well mapped out, for the LA area, anyway.

Here I feel required to give credit where it's due: George Allen Hancock was the oil man developing the rancho he had rights to when the first fossils were discovered. In the area where those fossils were discovered, he stopped digging for oil and started digging for fossils. He had two types of crews working his land, and to this day, the millions of things pulled out of the bitumen were done by hand, starting back in 1914 and continuing to this day.

Hancock gifted the land to the city to protect it.

Afterwards, upon ascertaining what the little dudes wanted for lunch, we found a proper restaurant and grubbed down.

The souvenir I got for Ari was reasonably priced and very neat: a die-sized glassy-jewel shaped like a movie diamond. Cass wanted the following badass mammoth puzzle, which he finished in an hour and a half after we got home. (It was more expensive than I usually budget for souvenirs, but it's very cool, so I made the call.)

At the giftshop I looked for something for Camille. I also usually look for books, and they tend to be other than the kid souvenirs. This time, as I was trying to manage the boys, I picked up a book about a baby girl mammoth who wants to be just like her dad, and I realized I'm a sucker:

It's cute. Daddy Daycare Field Trip was a success!