Fossils Unearthed Near Tar Pits Provide Clue to L.A.’s Ice Age

More than 20 pounds of fossil bones that should provide the first clear idea of what everyday life was like here shortly after the most recent Ice Age have been recovered from a construction site near the La Brea Tar Pits, officials of the George C. Page Museum said Thursday.

The site, on the fringe of the area known as Rancho La Brea, produced “the largest concentration of fossil wood the museum has found,” assistant curator George Jefferson said. Excavators also found “the best, most complete specimen of tapir ever recovered from Rancho La Brea,” he said.

The site is also significant, Jefferson added, because it represents the remains of debris deposited in a stream bed 15,000 to 25,000 years ago.

Other sites at La Brea are tar pits or mixtures of tar pits and stream beds, he noted, “and they give us a biased sample of life in that time period.” An unusually large percentage of fossils from the pits represent trapped bison and other large animals and the carnivores that preyed upon them.

“The fossils from the stream bed should give us a much better idea of what was going on in the normal situation, so that we can better interpret what all the fossils mean in terms of their environment,” Jefferson said. The excavation is taking place in preparation for the construction of the $150-million Wilshire Courtyard complex on Wilshire Boulevard.

The foundation will be 30 feet deep. Before digging started, the developer of the complex, J. H. Snyder Co., forged an unusual agreement that permitted the Page Museum and USC paleontologist Robert Douglas to monitor the activity.

Graduate students and post-doctoral fellows from Douglas’ laboratory have been watching the digging closely. “Because it’s a stream bed, there is a lot of wood,” said Paul Scrivener, one of the monitors. “If we see some wood, we have them stop digging while we look through the shovel. If there is something interesting, we have them dump it to one side for us to examine it closely.”

Among the larger specimens obtained from the site are a roughly two-pound section of tooth from a wooly mammoth, the rib of a dire wolf and the intact jaw of the tapir. The tapir specimen is “the single most important find,” Jefferson said, because the museum has only three small foot bones from a tapir collected at the pits, not enough for a precise identification.