Major Cache of Fossils Unearthed In Los Angeles

aedmunde sends along news from the LA Times: "A nearly intact mammoth, dubbed Zed, is among the remarkable discoveries near the La Brea Tar Pits. It's the largest known deposit of Pleistocene ice age fossils... in what might seem to be the unlikeliest of places — under an old May Co. parking lot in L.A.'s tony Miracle Mile shopping district. ...huge chunks of soil from the site have been removed intact and now sit in large wooden crates on the back lot... The 23 crates range... from the size of a desk to that of a small delivery truck... There were, in fact, 16 separate deposits on the site, an amount that, by her estimate, would have taken 20 years to excavate conventionally. ... Carefully identifying the edges of each deposit, her team dug trenches around them and underneath, isolating the deposits on dirt pedestals. After wrapping heavy plastic around the deposits, workers built wooden crates similar to tree boxes and lifted them out individually with a heavy crane. The biggest one weighed 123,000 pounds."

Comments

Re:123,000 pounds in modern money?

[Teun]

You got a point.

But the explanation is rather mundane, lets take some hypothetical super tanker accident.

The oil company will claim less than ten thousand tons of oil might have leaked away.
The clean up company will report about fifty five thousand barrels of oil to collect and Green Peace will talk about a disaster involving over twelve million litres of crude oil polluting the environment.