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Celebrating a Century of Fossil Finds In the La Brea Tar Pits
An anonymous reader writes "A century ago on Monday, the predecessor to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County began a two-year project to uncover the Ice Age creatures that became trapped in the La Brea Tar Pits. 'Digs over the years have unearthed bones of mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed cats, dire wolves and other unsuspecting Ice Age creatures that became trapped in ponds of sticky asphalt. But it's the smaller discoveries — plants, insects and rodents — in recent years that are shaping scientists' views of life in the region 11,000 to 50,000 years ago.'"
I thought the world was only 6,000 years old?
Richard Dawkins on Real Time this weekend said, "People who believe the earth was created 6,000 years ago, when it's actually 4.5 billion years old, should also believe the width of N America is 8 yards. That is the scale of the error."
Less *is* more.
If you're ever in Los Angeles, you should visit the museum. The specimens are only about 50,000 years old and they were almost perfectly preserved by falling into the tar pits. Their skeletons are remarkably intact. It's not like dinosaur fossils which are extensively reconstructed. Every last little bone and joint is original and in excellent condition.
There are all sorts of massive mammals like sabre-tooth tigers, giant sloths, giant camels which apparently roamed North America until fairly recently, etc.
It's a worthwhile excursion if you happen to be in LA.
They have dug up millions of bones - to what purpose?
The bones is a byproduct. The important thing is the information we got from them. The reason we don't dispose of the bones is because they might still have stories to tell.
Depending on how nihilistic you want to be one can say that there is no point in getting information on when and how different traits evolved. If you want to go all retard-capitalistic on it you can say that it doesn't provide anything of economic value.
Those views can be applied to pretty much all science, be it astrophysics to philosophy. Those views are also incredibly short-sighted and something one would expect from a PHB that can't see beyond the next quarter.
They have dug up millions of bones - to what purpose? One would think that by now they have enough to fill a large warehouse that no-one will ever look at again, except may another archeologist digging up Los Angeles and wondering how all these ancient bones became so mixed up in a big jumble with traces of rust in the clay, around the big altar of the 21st century religious complex known as 'the museum'...
I used to wonder about that too until a paleontologist explained to me that digging up large amounts of bones, even from mundane species like duckbilled dinosaurs, can yield all sorts of data bout things like: what was the extent of variations in skeletal morphology? what did these critters die of, i.e. diseases, who ate them? how did different predators kill duckbills? (which tell you something about a whole range of predators that you have practically no other way of finding out except maybe uber-rare fossilized footprints) .... the list goes on. You can also infer things about social behavior by digging up large collections of bones from a single species, you can get clues from them about how environmental factors affected population size and which environmental extremes limited a species' habitat. Another example is archaic humans whose skeletal remains are a couple of steps up from dragon's teeth on the rarity scale. The grand to total of the Neanderthal remains is IIRC about 100 (mostly incomplete) skeletons which is an unusually large sample size. It's also wroth noting that Neanderthals existed for c.a 350.000 years so that's one skeleton per 35.000 years. The skeletal remains of most older hominid species are much, much more rare. In the last few decades archaic humans have been sub-divided into a large number of subspecies based on differences in skeletal morphology and often a species classification is based on a one or two incomplete skeletons. Recently a unusually large cache of Archaic human bones was found at Dmanisi in Georgia. The morphological differences between the different individuals of that population were found to be about the same as those found in modern humans. Just for example, the Dmanisi finds included an individual whose brain size was half that of most of his contemporaries so one can conclude that brain size is no conclusive indicator of how primitive an individual is. Its the way the brain works that is important not so much the brain size. This find in Dmanisi has led to the realization that a whole group of Archaic human 'variants' including, Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo gautengensis, Homo ergaster and Homo erectus were probably the same species and that they may have been been erroneously over-divided into subspecies by scientist reading far too much into variations in skeletal morphology. This is not to say those scientists made a mistake, they just did not have the broad collection of bones available that they needed to establish extremes in morphological variation and drew what conclusions they could based on the evidence available. Thats how science works: procure evidence, examine it, draw conclusions, create a theory, get new evidence, examine it, draw conclusions, revise your theory. It's also what irritates the piss out of religionists who like to have a single never changing doctrine, scientists keep changing their minds.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
If you have never visited The La Brea Tar Pits (which translates to The Tar-Tar pits?) and have a chance, go there! Plan to visit the museum. In the museum is a whole wall of dire wolf skulls, back lit with a yellow light. Creepy.
My favorite is "old smiley," the California Sabre Tooth Tiger, Smilodonius Californius. A Scientific American Magazine devoted to dinosaurs about 15 years ago had this to say about dinosaurs, which also applies to this mammal , (paraphrase), 'Thank God we have all these fossils to tell us about these extinct creatures, but mostly thank god they're all dead!'
By the way, throwing a body into the tar pits doesn't work. It takes days to sink in, and I think they even have put fencing under the surface of the tar near the edge of the pits to catch things like this. (It took me almost two hours at 3AM to get a body back out, just in time before the sun came up!)
You have offered your opinion to this discussion thread - to what purpose? One would think that by now we have enough to fill the internet that no-one will ever look at again.
The purpose, I suppose, is that sometimes the what's dug up offers something new. A new story or idea. Sometimes radically so. But you have to go through a lot of the same-old mundanes to get to them.
The jury is still out on your opinion, but I'm thinking it's part of the mundane. But thanks for contributing.
Great post, but shouldn't it be one skeleton per 3.500 years? (350.000 / 100)
Yeah (red faced) it should be. But that's still an amazingly low number of specimens for the best documented archaic human species we know of. For a very crude estimate (and I hope I get my math right this time) If we assume the average Neanderthal population world wide over those 350.000 years was 50.000 people, a generation is 25 years and there are three generations alive at the same time you get 50.000/3 ~ 16600 new Neanderthals each generation, so over 350.000 years you have (350.000/25) * 16600 = 231 million Neanderthals that ever lived and we have a sample of 100. Those numbers are crude but they still give you a rough idea of how tiny the sample size is since hominids were never anywhere nears as common in the ecosystem as, say bison or caribou.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow