Major Cache of Fossils Unearthed In Los Angeles 215
aedmunde sends along news from the LA Times: "A nearly intact mammoth, dubbed Zed, is among the remarkable discoveries near the La Brea Tar Pits. It's the largest known deposit of Pleistocene ice age fossils... in what might seem to be the unlikeliest of places — under an old May Co. parking lot in L.A.'s tony Miracle Mile shopping district. ...huge chunks of soil from the site have been removed intact and now sit in large wooden crates on the back lot... The 23 crates range... from the size of a desk to that of a small delivery truck... There were, in fact, 16 separate deposits on the site, an amount that, by her estimate, would have taken 20 years to excavate conventionally. ... Carefully identifying the edges of each deposit, her team dug trenches around them and underneath, isolating the deposits on dirt pedestals. After wrapping heavy plastic around the deposits, workers built wooden crates similar to tree boxes and lifted them out individually with a heavy crane. The biggest one weighed 123,000 pounds."
This is a good thing? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Flintstone (Score:1, Interesting)
So while this find is quite nice, it's by no means the best ever.
Considering where it was found, I don't think the researchers will be complaining. The interesting point to this story though is the fact that the "nearly intact" (FTA: "he appears to be about 80% complete") mammoth was found in L.A., which is hardly frozen Artic tundra.
Researchers from the George C. Page Museum at the La Brea tar pits have barely begun extracting the fossils from the sandy, tarry matrix of soil
If it was the composition of the soil in which the body was buried that preserved it for so long, then perhaps similar finds could be made in other non-tundra climes.
Really?? No jokes about Susan Saradon?? (Score:1, Interesting)
When the Hell did it become trolling to make jokes at the expense of Susan Saradon?
Re:123,000 pounds in modern money? (Score:5, Interesting)
But the explanation is rather mundane, lets take some hypothetical super tanker accident.
The oil company will claim less than ten thousand tons of oil might have leaked away.
The clean up company will report about fifty five thousand barrels of oil to collect and Green Peace will talk about a disaster involving over twelve million litres of crude oil polluting the environment.
Re:The pope? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's appropriate you mention the Reformation and Counter Reformation. One of Martin Luther's big peeves was the fact that the Church didn't want average people to read the bible, because it created too much dependence of the local priests, and was inevitably abused. The Church's stated reason was that the bible had to be interpreted by experts so that the laity didn't get confused by the Bible's complexity.
Fast forward a few hundred years - Luther's spiritual descendants (some of them anyway) are doing EXACTLY what the Church said they would do.
Re:Not fossils - bones! (Score:2, Interesting)
Good point. NOT fossils. Chemically preserved.
There are also questions about exactly what happened at those "tar pits". Ye Olde Idea of critters getting stuck in the tar (maybe beneath a watering hole), predators coming and getting stuck, etc. has been severely questioned. Mainly because of a real lack of complete skeletons, many bones found at the bottom of very narrowly necked holes, etc. And WAY too many predators (and very few birds, especially vulture types).
Interesting place, but the entire concept needs some serious examination.
Re:123,000 pounds in modern money? (Score:1, Interesting)
Posting as AC because I moderated on this thread.
I'm a state certified weighmaster in California and one of my duties at work is operating a truck scale. Although the product we ship (bulk salt) is sold by the ton, the trucks are weighed in pounds.