Reliving the Old Days at the Pit: Can You Dig It?
For Mary Romig, work is the pits--and she loves it.
Specifically, her labor of love is at the bottom of a stinky 13-foot-deep black hole called Pit 91.
On Thursday morning, flanked by two other paleontological excavators, named Richard Reynolds and Eric Scott, she resumed the painstaking business of scraping away stubbornly adhesive super-antique asphalt in quest of ancient bones accidentally interred in the world-famous La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles’ Hancock Park.
Except for a couple of weeks last year, during the Summer Olympics, no digging had been done in Pit 91 since 1981, when funds ran out.
The dig is the only one in a major American city where the general public can watch scientists at the exquisitely slow and delicate process of uncovering the fossilized remains of creatures who got stuck in the tarry muck 10,000 to 40,000 years ago. Over the years, more than 1 million fossils from 550 assorted species have been recovered from the various tar pits of La Brea.
Work on Pit 91, begun in 1969, halted in 1981 when the Natural History Museum Foundation, which raised funds for the project, ran out of money and could not find any new donors.
George Jefferson, assistant curator of the George C. Page Museum of the La Brea Discoveries, said Thursday that excavation of Pit 91 (the only active one on the site for many years) was resumed only briefly last summer and proved so popular with Olympic visitors that the museum decided to put up $12,000 in ordinary operating funds to finance the two-month effort, which began Thursday.
The work can be viewed by the public at no fee from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Wednesdays and from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays.
Jefferson said he hopes that the diggers (working eight hours a day, six days a week) will be able to expose the “central bone mass” known to be at the bottom of the pit. The fossil “mother lode” was discovered in 1913 by a county crew but was later covered over.
The excavators could eventually recover “a great jumble of bones, teeth and other fossils about 10 by 15 feet in diameter,” the paleontologist said.
Jefferson said that if funds can be found to support further digging in the next few years, he expects some exciting new fossil finds.
“We know there is a likelihood of finding (bits and pieces) of the homotherium, a very rare saber-toothed cat, and of a prehistoric cheetah which may be related to the African cat of the same name,” he said.
The last really big find in Pit 91, according to Jefferson, was the pelvis of an Ice Age giant ground sloth, plus the animal’s upper and lower hind legs, still partly articulated. The ground sloth was about eight or nine feet tall with a skull about three feet long, Jefferson said.
On Thursday, news reporters and camera crews were allowed (at their own risk) to climb down a tar-sticky ladder into the pit, where Romig, Reynolds and Scott were on hands and knees hard at work scraping asphalt in neat squares. In the spot where they were working, the stuff was about the consistency of badly made fudge and the color of very high quality licorice.
They use small hand trowels to scrape the crumbly natural asphalt, sweep it into dustbins and transfer it to five-gallon buckets.
Painstaking Work
Reynolds, who has been doing this kind of work for 26 years, estimated that he can produce about 12 buckets a day of “sterile” asphalt--patches in which it is known that there are no fossils. Even in such patches, only about an inch-deep slice is scraped out. Each tiny excavation produces about an ounce of the crumbly matter, which is saved in case it may contain micro-fossils, such as bugs and their ilk.
When the diggers actually turn up a fossil, the work goes even slower. As an indication of just how tedious the work is, excavators scraped their hearts out in Pit 91 from 1969 to 1981, and the neat hole is only 28 by 28 feet square, and 13 feet deep.
Romig, 56, began working in Pit 91 in 1970 as a volunteer. After the hole was closed down in 1981, she continued as a volunteer in the Page Museum. Romig is getting paid now, but she confessed that she digs digging so much that she would do it for nothing.
Beside her, as she scraped patiently away on Thursday, were pieces of a dire wolf’s jaw and a joint from a saber-toothed cat that had been discovered some time ago. The bones were there for her inspiration--and for publicity value--to illustrate the kinds of fossils she and the others are looking for.
Romig’s hands were sticky with tar, her non-designer jeans and work shirt were covered with fudgy blackness. But she was smiling the smile of a contented woman, even though the work is hard on her knees and back.
“I’m not finding anything right now,” she said, “but when I do find a fossil, I’m ecstatic! But even when I’m not finding anything, I enjoy it.”
And when a reporter made the inevitable comment: “It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it, right?” Romig--who must have heard that one a hundred times--smiled a politely weary smile and replied: “I like getting dirty.”