La Brea Tar Pits-5801 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA In 1828, when southern California was still part of Mexico, the Mexican government included the current La Brea pits as part of a land grant known as Rancho La Brea (Spanish for “the tar ranch”), which stipulated that the landowner must permit Angelinos to retrieve as much tar as they needed for personal use. By the late 19th century, asphalt from La Brea fetched twenty dollars a ton after it was refined for various purposes, including road building. Bones recovered in those early collections were dismissed as the remains of domestic animals. It was not until 1875 that the geologist William Denton visited the tar pits and identified the canine tooth of a saber-toothed cat. Denton reported his find, but the rest of the scientific community took little notice. No one bothered with any large-scale recovery of the fossils until after 1901, when William W. Orcutt, a geologist who was investigating oil resources in the vicinity, noted that the bones in the asphalt seeps belonged to many extinct species. Suddenly the tar pits became all the rage, as amateurs and institutions competed for the fossil treasures. Excavation peaked at Rancho La Brea between 1905 and 1915, when literally millions of bones were taken out of the ground. In 1913, the landowner, George Alan Hancock, finally acted on his fears that the fossils would be taken from the community and scattered widely; he granted exclusive rights to excavate the fossil resources to Los Angeles County’s fledgling Natural History Museum but only for 2 years. Excavators made $3.50 a day!
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 18:18:39 +0000
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