Stuck in Time : Closed since the quake, the Natural History Museum’s Burbank branch reopens with ‘Treasures of the Tar Pits.’

Chris Shaw was mounting the cast of a 20,000-year-old camel skull in the Media City Center when a shopper came up to him.

“Camels?” she said. “We had camels here?”

You bet. Camels and lions and short-faced bears and imperial mammoths and large-headed llamas and saber-toothed cats and a host of other animals, most of them long extinct. And the reason we know so much about those animals and the other living things that once filled the Los Angeles Basin is because countless numbers of them were trapped in the sticky asphalt of the La Brea tar pits.

The Natural History Museum/Burbank has been closed since it was shaken Jan. 17 by the Northridge quake. It reopens today on a high note with “Treasures of the Tar Pits,” an exhibit that tells the story of the Southland’s Ice Age animals and the unique asphalt deposits that both killed and preserved them.

The show is the first traveling exhibit to document the amazing cache of Ice Age fossils that have been pulled from the pools of asphalt (not tar) that continue to bubble up in Hancock Park, perfuming the air with pitch. After five years on the road, the exhibit will end its tour in Burbank, where visitors can do everything from handle a fossilized thigh bone to see for themselves just how tenacious asphalt can be.

Shaw, 42, who lives in Granada Hills, is collections manager at the George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries in Hancock Park and helped organize the show. As Shaw explains, he and his colleagues set out to give visitors a coherent picture of what life was like in the Los Angeles Basin in the late Pleistocene era, about 20,000 years ago. Shaw thinks many people will be surprised by what they see. In Shaw’s view, the biggest misconception most people have is about the climate of the period. “People expect it to be a more tropical environment,” he says. In fact, the Southland of the time was probably several degrees cooler than it is now and somewhat more humid.

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For more than 40,000 years, Los Angeles’ asphalt deposits have acted as what Shaw terms a “self-baiting trap.” Over the eons, millions of animals have stumbled onto the surface asphalt, which someone once described as “the color of very good licorice and the consistency of very bad fudge.”

Less like quicksand than flypaper, the asphalt held onto its victims, which sometimes died of starvation and exhaustion. More often, the struggling animals attracted predators, many of which were snared in turn. In warm weather especially, when the asphalt becomes more viscous, the deposits become carnivore traps. Four sabertooths, dire wolves and other carnivores died in the tar pits for every imperial mammoth, Western horse and other large herbivore that lost its life there.

To this day, the tar pits trap pigeons and other small mammals and even the occasional human. A few years ago, a Page Museum staffer got stuck when he scrambled over a fence to recover a traffic cone someone had tossed onto the surface of Pit 61/67. The worst of it, he said after his colleagues rescued him: “One man came by and said to his son, ‘See! That’s how the dumb animals got stuck,’ and then walked away!”

Mary Ann Dunn, administrator of the Burbank museum, says one of the show’s highlights is the Mark Hallett mural that was commissioned for the traveling exhibit. The painting, which measures 4 by 8 1/2 feet, details a moment in the Darwinian struggle that took place daily at the tar pits. Depicting a remarkable number of the more than 550 plant and animal species that have been found at the site, the mural, Dunn notes, “is not only correct scientifically, it’s a work of art.”

The show also features six skeletons--all real fossilized bone--of animals that died in the local asphalt. Originally the skeletons were exhibited in the “dead-animal poses” typical of older museums, but Shaw and a colleague remounted them in more evocative positions. Now the Ice Age coyote seems to howl at the moon. The male dire wolf sniffs the female. The American lion stands with cocked head. And the sabertooth crouches as if ready to pounce, while its intended prey, a Harlan’s giant ground sloth, raises an arm to defend itself.

A major scientific discovery is reflected in the exhibit: the importance of micro-fossils to our understanding of the Ice Age. During the early period of excavation at the tar pits, which began in 1913, the fossil collectors showed “a bias toward the large,” Shaw says. More than a million bones were dug up during that period, but less than 1% were remains of plants or animals smaller than a rabbit.

Today scientists know that smaller fossils often contain more scientific information about matters such as the former climate of the site than mastodon skulls and other big, dramatic trophies.

“The animals and plants that produce micro-fossils usually live in the area where they were born,” Shaw explains. “They can tell you a lot more about the conditions in the specific sites where they are found than the fossils of large mammals and birds that can migrate as much as 30 miles a day.”

In some cases, the only fossils of insects and other tiny living things that survive from the early digs were found in dirt inadvertently left inside the skulls of sabertooths. Fossilized plant matter has been found packed into pits in the teeth of extinct bison. Since scientists began excavating again in the mid-1960s at Pit 91, they have added more than 300 species, most of them small, to the 250 originally found.

The show offers other treasures, including a cast of the skull of the only ancient human whose remains have been found in the tar pits. Called La Brea woman, she was a Chumash-like Indian felled in her 20s by a blow from a blunt instrument. Museum folks refer to the 9,000-year-old woman as Los Angeles’ first murder victim. The kids are going to love her story and everything else here. Just warn them before they go that they aren’t going to see dinosaurs. The Jurassic giants were extinct long before the tar pits began to work their wicked, fascinating work.

Where and When

What: Exhibit “Treasures of the Tar Pits.”

Location: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County/Burbank, 555 N. Third St., Burbank.

Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Continues through Sept. 5.

Price: $3.50 for general, $2.50 for seniors and students with ID, and $1.50 for children 5 through 12.

Call: (818) 557-3562.