I took one week vacation at the end of last year around Los Angels area. It was very nice to leave behind cold New York and enjoy warm southern California. Besides that, the most impressive visit was not to Hollywood, Beverly Hills or Universal Studio, but rather Page Museum. It was a museum where I expected to see fossils of dinosaurs when I first heard of it but I was completely wrong and yet happily surprised.
It's a local museum and by local I mean that all the fossils there were dug out of the area right out side the museum. And how many fossils? Millions of them!
Right through the entrance, there were a few metal rods in a big bucket to test the physical strength of visitors. Everybody would stop by to pull up a rod and nobody could do it with one fast pull. The only way to do it is to pull firmly and steadily to work against the powerful suction at the other end of the rod. What's at the other end? A pool of asphalt, or simply put, tar.
It was big pools of tar that trapped hundreds of thousands of animals from 10,000 years ago to 40,000 years ago! According to the staff, it takes only two inches of tar to immobilize the strongest animal during the age, mammoth. The danger was also under disguise with grass and water on top. One prey was trapped while seeking food and water, drawing predators to feast and later scavengers to clean up, and all of them ended up being trapped. Very often an entire food chain was mercilessly consumed by the powerful tar pits.
There are numerous amazing displays, mammoth mother and baby, sabre toothed tigers (Okay, cats), a wall of hundreds of wolf skulls, various birds and insects ... but no dinosaurs since their extinction was 65 million years ago and that was way before the time of the tar pits.
I couldn't help asking whether any human remains were found. The answer was just one. Our human ancestors were smart enough to understand the danger of tar pits; otherwise, humans would have become extinct just like mammoths and sabre toothed cats.
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