A Bone to Pick : At the La Brea Tar Pits, Volunteers Are Reconstructing the Lives of Animals--as Well as Their Skeletons

Take the path behind the Los Angeles County Museum, past the “psychic cats” (whose owner claims they can predict the future), past the outdoor jugglers, musicians and mimes, and you’ll find life as it was lived 40,000 years BC (Before Canter’s) at Wilshire and Fairfax.

The George C. Page Museum is filled with oddly endearing skeletal remains of creatures that once roamed the streets where we live--and that had a much more limited choice of cuisine. They ate each other.

It is misnamed “the dinosaur place” by kiddies plugged into the Jurassic era, but nothing Steven Spielberg ever concocted could equal the awesome reality of evolution as revealed in the La Brea tar pits and the museum that celebrates what was found inside them.

Wily dire wolves, mastodons, woolly mammoths, saber-tooth cats, giant ground sloths and huge five-toed birds, among other extinct Ice-Age animals, have been lovingly reconstructed at the Page, bone by tar-stained bone.

Although thousands of Angelenos whiz past the pits in their cars each day, many have never heard of the museum and some think the pits themselves are just another man-made tourist attraction.

“Are they real, or was the stuff built somewhere and transplanted over here?” asks Steve Cherin, 33, a Hollywood computer programmer who drives by often and says he’s “never had a grip” on what the La Brea tar pits are all about. Says a friend who rides with him: “This is Hollywood you know. So I always thought the pits were fake.”

Think again.

The bones, millions of them, first turned up in the 1860s when Maj. Henry Hancock bought acres of commercially valuable land. Hancock soon discovered another kind of value in the oozy black muck that dotted his holdings. From 1913 to 1915, workers extracted more than 1 million bones from the tar pits. To date, 1.5 million vertebrate and 2.5 million invertebrate fossils have been recovered from the site--more than 140 species of plants and 420 species of animals in addition to birds and insects.

The dry statistics don’t begin to explain the impact these fossils have on museum visitors of every age. Suspended from wires in the cozy, child-friendly space, the reconstructed skeletons project a presence and personality that is much more than the sum of their bones.

Because they are not behind glass--because they are so . . . well, approachable and adorable--tour guide George Burleigh says visitors sometimes wonder aloud whether the giant woolly mammoth had a kindly face and whether the saber-tooth cat had cuddly cubs. The answer: Nobody knows. But the folks at the Page are working on it.

Day after day, they investigate this and other aspects of everyday life in the Pleistocene era, which occurred 65 million years after the last dinosaurs died.

So far, says paleontologist and collection manager Christopher Shaw, scientists have come up with lots of information. For example: When an injured saber-tooth cat awoke in the heavy morning mists of what is now Los Angeles, a saber-tooth friend was ready with the Ice-Age equivalent of breakfast in bed.

The cats were social creatures that cared for one another, Shaw says. How can he know such a thing 40,000 years later?

Shaw, his colleagues, and dozens of museum volunteers spend their lives trying to find such things out.

“I work on it by day and think about it all night,” says Ted Connors, a former Rand Corp. military analyst who became a museum volunteer after retirement. Three days a week, from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m., he identifies bone fragments, pieces them together and catalogues them under Shaw’s direction.

Shaw’s work is to reconstruct not just the skeletons of the animals, but also their habits, behaviors and daily lives. He knows the cats fed and cared for each other because “we studied infirm bones that show evidence of having healed after a traumatic injury. We know from the bone that the animal was at one time crippled. We also know there must have been a reason the animal survived to show evidence of so much healing. If he were uncared for, he would have died. He could not hunt food if he was crippled, and he would have been vulnerable to attack by enemies. There had to be a social organization in which the injured cat was nurtured and protected by others until he got well.”

By studying the structure and anatomy of an animal, Shaw says, “We can also learn how it used its body to hunt for prey and feed itself.”

First there has to be a body structure to study.

That’s been the hard part. Bones found in the tar pits were dis-articulated--that is, not joined together or connected in any logical way. A horse may have stepped into the tar, been imprisoned there and set upon by a hungry saber-tooth cat. The cat, stuck in the muck while gnawing on the horse, was attacked by a pack of wolves.

Parts of all their bodies were entombed and preserved, leaving behind a muddle of bones. Since there are no similar live animals or even similar fossils anywhere on Earth, there appeared to be no way to know which bones belonged where, on what animal.

It was guesswork for years, and huge piles of bones remained unidentified and uncatalogued. Then in 1975, shortly after philanthropist George C. Page donated money to build the museum, excavators found a deposit of bones that contained some semi-articulated skeletons.

“It was the only time we have found bones we could say came from one individual animal,” says Shelly Cox, director of the museum’s glass-enclosed “fishbowl lab,” where she and a staff of volunteers clean bones and try to make preliminary identifications.

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The tar pits, by the way, aren’t tar pits at all. They’re asphalt pits, Cox says: “Tar is a man-made substance.” Asphalt is technically the lowest grade of crude oil. When that oil has seeped to the surface it is liquid asphalt.

After cleaning, the fossils are passed on to Shaw and his volunteers, who do more advanced IDs, piecing together, cataloguing and curating.

Now that there are some complete fossils showing the exact structure of the ancient beasts, the staff has been having great successes.

Volunteer Mary Gilles has been given the task of identifying saber-tooth cat toe bones, which she does by sifting through bones from early excavations and comparing them with those of a skeletal foot found intact in 1975.

Connors, currently nicknamed “slothie-man” by his colleagues, is doing the same with the giant ground sloth, a creature for whom he has some respect. “You can’t help but wonder about the animal, what kind of personality it had,” Connors says. “I am living with his bones every day.”

Gilles and Connors say they love their work, that no amount of money could replace their job satisfaction. In a sense, they are living two lives--in the present and in the past. Unlike most people, they are constantly made aware of the unbroken chain that connects everything that has ever lived and breathed on Earth.