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The La Brea tar pits
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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