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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."
They are called, "old people", and yes, there are a lot of them in L.A.
Wow, that's a mammoth of a find.
Zed's dead baby, zed's dead.
The fossils were found under a parking lot.
Obvious really - Thag and his wife Urga came back from the show to find their trusty mammoth leg-clamped for over-parking. They couldn't afford the unclamping fee, so had to walk home. The rest is history.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
> "in what might seem to be the unlikeliest of places..."
Hey, Marge! I found fossils in a known tar pit - who would have guessed.....!!
They've found COMPLETE frozen wooly mammoths in the Artic tundra in Russia, complete with hair and all
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/03/0324_050324_mammoth.html
So while this find is quite nice, it's by no means the best ever.
..........FULL STOP.
from the size of a desk to that of a small delivery truck
For those of you who prefer more conventional measurement units, that's between 0.35 and 2.5 volkswagens.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Just in case anybody cares, "La Brea" is Spanish for "the Tar," so "The La Brea Tar Pits" translates into "The The Tar Tar Pits."
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Have they found the MPAA's business model yet? ;)
ziiing!
Whats the harm in yelling 'Computer, end program!'? You could be living in Star Trek! Go on.. give it a try.
This story is tagged "metricplease", but they didn't have the metric system in the mesozoic era. Sheesh.
I seriously don't see the link between the Pope and US puritan nuts. Or between the pope and the young-earth idiocy for that matter.
If you look as far as back as St Augustine Of Hippo, he wrote in no uncertain terms that only an idiot would take the Genesis literally. "It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are." That's pretty much a thorough flaming of that point of view. He got sanctified by the catholic church, btw.
Plus, whatever bigotry the catholics might have had against science, were gone in the counter-reformation. (They had to try to stop losing ground to the protestants _somehow_.) The Society Of Jesus for example, is pretty much a scientific order sponsored by the Vatican. Those guys operate research labs and universities. And yes, they teach evolution and the big bang.
Also let's remember that the Vatican, including the current pope, btw, has officially proclaimed Darwinism as correct. So you won't find _them_ arguing that dinosaur fossils were placed there to test your faith.
Now I'm not saying the catholics are without fault. But ffs, blame them for their real faults, not for bullshit strawmen. Lumping them together with the young-earthers just shows massive ignorance. Blaming it on the pope is like blaming the fall of Byzantium on the emperor of China. That freaking stupid.
It seems to me like some people aren't in it even for the science-vs-religion parts, but just because they're cretin trolls seeking to annoy someone, anyone for attention.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I was shown around the crates late last year. They are not fossils - they are bones that have been preserved by the tar. They have not undergone transformation in sedimentary rock.
I also gave the tar a good poking with a stick. It's easy to see how large four-legged animals would get stuck in it.
The museum also has a huge collection of sabre-tooth tigers - who thought all the stuck prey would be an easy catch....
I've only ever been able to manage a partial mammoth.
Sorry, I'll get my skins.
but the article says they took over 3 months to unearth them TWO YEARS ago. Kind of took a little excitement out of it to get nearly through the whole article to find out this all took place years ago. Would have been nice to have more pictures of the process and maybe an explanation as to how they found the edges of the deposits - ground penetrating radar maybe?
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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.
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Future archaeologists are going to be confused when they find all these dinosaurs buried in Hollywood. I predict that museums by then will have huge wax models of Will Smith riding a triceratops.