Los Angeles Times: Major cache of fossils unearthed in L.A.
New York Times: Los Angeles Tar Yields Mammoth’s Skeleton

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art was digging down to build an underground parking garage when fossils were discovered. Luckily, their next door neighbor is the La Brea Tar Pits, a research museum dedicated to archaeology! This Wednesday, researchers announced the discovery of an almost fully intact skeleton of a Colombian mammoth—only missing its right back leg. Also exciting, they are finding myriad “smaller fossils of tree trunks, turtles, snails, clams, millipedes, fish, gophers and even mats of oak leaves.” The archaeologists are looking to develop a fuller, more detailed picture of the world and what it was like 10,000 to 40,000 years ago. In previous excavations of the Tar Pits, excavators disregarded the smaller fossils and threw them out with the dirt, focusing on animal bones.

Because the parking garage still needed to be built, archaeologists couldn’t spend weeks sifting through the dirt at the site. So, they dug out the ground in chunks and stored intact blocks in crates, which were deposited at La Brea’s laboratory.

There are sixteen separate deposits of fossils and bones in the garage region. It was estimated that to excavate the area conventionally, down in the dirt with picks and brushes, would have taken about twenty years. However, Robin Turner, founder of ArchaeoPaleo Resource Management Inc. of Culver City, and the overseer for the project, had to come up with a new way to brush away all the soil. So, the teams marked the edges of each separate deposit, and then dug trenches around the blocks, isolating each deposit. Then, it was wrapped tightly in plastic, and a wooden crate was built around it. The crate was then lifted by crane out of the site, keeping the section of ground intact for later excavation.
Mammoth skeletons uncovered in the tar pits so far have only been pieced together from remains of multiple mammoths—no full mammoth skeleton has been uncovered there before. So, Zed, the Colombian mammoth discovered there, proves to be especially exciting. However, the sheer amount of specimens from this site is astounding. The Museum is expecting to excavate two times the amount of artifacts as they currently have in their possession. And the La Brea Museum already HAS the largest collection of specimens from this period, NOT including these crates.

To get an idea of the vast amount of specimens, consider this: so far, “only an area about 6 feet by 4 feet and about 2 1/2 feet deep” has been excavated, and from just that small area, “they have so far removed a complete saber-tooth cat skeleton, six dire-wolf skulls and bones from two other saber-tooth cats, a giant ground sloth, and a North American lion,” not including 700 additional plant and animal specimens.

These articles show how meticulous science can be—excavations take time. Lots and lots of time. Also, science is innovative to fill needs. The Art Museum needed the site to not be an ongoing dig—they had a garage to build. So, the archaeologists developed a novel way to excavate, by transplanting the blocks of ground into crates, to be preserved for digging—later. Sometimes hard data collection needs to wait, because there can be so much necessary preparation before the scientists can do anything. I have also realized how much there is in this earth, underfoot—so much is preserved in dirt. Dirt is awesome.

One Question: What tests are run on the plant and animal specimens/fossils, and what are researchers looking for?