The La Brea tar pits
A trap that caught predators for thousands of years
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Rancho La Brea is a site in the middle of Los Angeles where crude oil seeps from the ground and stiffens into sticky asphalt. The over-representation of predators makes La Brea a skewed but unusually rich sample of Ice Age south-western North America: dire wolves, Smilodon, short-faced bears, mammoths and condors with three-metre wingspans. The material spans tens of millennia and lets researchers measure how individual species changed with the climate. Only one human has been found — a woman dated to around ten thousand years ago.
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In the middle of Los Angeles, natural asphalt seeps from the ground. Animals became stuck in the sticky mass, and predators that came to eat them became stuck in turn. That is why far more wolves and sabre-toothed cats have been found here than prey animals — over two thousand sabre-toothed cats alone.
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