magstravs: La Brea Tar Pits

These pleasant looking gardens are actually built over the edge of an oil field where asphalt bubbles to the surface.

55 million years ago animals came to drink here and got trapped by the tar. In the 1870/80s the asphalt was commercially mined but gradually it came to be understood that the lumps that were being found were fossilised bones.

Professors from the University and the local High School teacher started bringing students to do a bit of amateur fossil hunting. In 1903 the Loss Angeles County was given sole digging rights for 2 years and in that time they excavated 89 tar pits. The remains were carted off to be displayed in the Natural history museum.

George C Page embodied the quintessential american dream. Born in Nebraska in 1917, his father died when he was 5 and he was raised as a farm-boy. When he was 12 his teacher gave him an orange and he was so enraptured with it he resolved to live where it came from, so at 16 he left home and hitched to Los Angeles. He worked as a busboy and a soda jerk and saved. One Xmas he sent a box of fruit home to his mother and the other lodgers at his boarding house were so impressed with how he arranged it they asked him to do the same for them. He invested the $1000 he'd saved and set up a business sending fruit gifts to other parts of the country. He bought a car manufacturer and in 1946 sold the packaging business and moved into real estate when prices had been depressed by the was and fears of invasion. he was fascinated by the Tar Pits but got fed up of travelling 7 miles between the pits and the fossils so he designed and built a museum on site to house the fossils.

There are several complete fossils (the odd missing bone may be faked). There are also films of animations of the animals as they are thought to have looked.