You might be surprised by how many fossils are from the La Brea Tar Pits

Sticky situation

The La Brea Tar Pits are a group of natural asphalt pools in the Miracle Mile neighborhood of Los Angeles. In the middle of the nation’s second-largest city, millions of fossils of animals that were trapped in the pits have been found.

On Oct. 6, 1875, professor William Denton of The Boston Society of Natural History published the first scientific description of bones he had found in the La Brea Tar Pits. “La Brea” means “tar pit” in Spanish, so the name is a bit repetitive, and some experts say they contain not tar but asphalt. That said, these pits turned out to have one of the best-preserved collections of creatures from the late Pleistocene era, 10,000-50,000 years ago.

The first intensive scientific examinations of the site were in 1912, conducted by professor John