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."
Not politically correct. (Score:5, Funny)
They are called, "old people", and yes, there are a lot of them in L.A.
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Not any more. Anybody in Los Angeles that looks to old is sent to the "Valley" where they're happier and the rest of the city doesn't have to look at them, or risk them being seen on TV.
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I live in the Valley.....*sob*
Re:Not politically correct. (Score:4, Funny)
Then we're going to have to ask you to turn in your webcam.
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I'm only 154 in dog years.
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Who's Zed? (Score:5, Funny)
Zed's dead baby, zed's dead.
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If Superman and the Flash were to race around the world (on foot), and they passed on either side of 'Captain Obvious AC, the Whooosh! they made would not compare to the one Captain Obvious just experienced.
whoosh? (Score:2)
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I thought the quote was quite apt, and its application humorous. But maybe that's because I was tripping the first time I saw Pulp Fiction.
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This [elvisblog.net] was my first thought.
Re:Not politically correct. (Score:5, Funny)
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I thought the largest deposit of fossils was in Washington DC.
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Wow (Score:3, Funny)
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Correction: Wow, that's a find of a lame mammoth.
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He was missing a leg, right? That would tend to make him a lame mammoth...
Not unlikely at all (Score:5, Funny)
The fossils were found under a parking lot.
Obvious really - Thag and his wife Urga came back from the show to find their trusty mammoth leg-clamped for over-parking. They couldn't afford the unclamping fee, so had to walk home. The rest is history.
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Some people really do deserve to get towed away by a troop of Velociraptors, especially those unevolved idiots who park in front of the mammoth stables. Some of us have to go hunting in the morning, you know.
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doh! (Score:5, Funny)
> "in what might seem to be the unlikeliest of places..."
Hey, Marge! I found fossils in a known tar pit - who would have guessed.....!!
ObFuturama (Score:2, Funny)
(Leela and Fry are in the Planet Express ship, trapped deep in the La Brea tar pits! Seeking any means of escape from Certain Doom, Leela scans the endless depths of their petroleum prison...)
[Leela looks at a scanner.]
LEELA
Confusing (Score:5, Funny)
For those of you who prefer more conventional measurement units, that's between 0.35 and 2.5 volkswagens.
Re:Confusing (Score:5, Funny)
I am so sick of every thread turning into some goddamn crusade for the metric system.
Look, people, this was in the US, so we're simply going to use the imperial system (.08 to 0.6 Chrysler Imperials).
Re:Confusing (Score:4, Funny)
I am so sick of every thread turning into some goddamn crusade for the metric system.
Look, people, this was in the US, so we're simply going to use the imperial system (.08 to 0.6 Chrysler Imperials).
My car gets 40 rods to the hog's head and that's the way I like it.
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Per Road & Track, my '70 Impala Sport Coup's trunk is large enough to carry 14 suitcases or a dead horse. Would that mean an Impala has a 1/2 Mammoth cargo capacity?
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Dammit...what is the conversion formula for Volkswagens to Library Of Congresses?
Or am I confusing dry weight with volumetric measurement?
Oh...drat...maybe Library Of Congresses only convert into teraGutenbergs?
Multiple redundancy (Score:5, Informative)
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Just in case anybody cares, "La Brea" is Spanish for "the Tar," so "The La Brea Tar Pits" translates into "The The Tar Tar Pits."
Don't you mean The Tar the Tar Pits?
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Are you honestly saying you can't see any difference between "The Tar the Tar Pits" and "The The Tar Tar Pits"?!?
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Re:Multiple redundancy (Score:5, Funny)
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Mmmm, tartar pits..... picks up a fried fish finger
You can get them next to the fried chicken lips place.
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Tar Tar Pits. He's going to be a character in the Clone Wars series.
Search your feelings! You KNOW it to be true!
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Multiple redundancy = Tautology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(rhetoric) [wikipedia.org]
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I don't even care anymore, being accustomed to "Personal Identification Number Number", "Automated Teller Machine Machine", "Network Interface Card Card", "With With Juice", and "Grilled Roasted Meat Steak"*.
Also, "The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim" [mlb.com] translates to "The The Angels Angels of Anaheim".
* Taco Bell used to advertise their "carne asada" taco as "grilled carne asada steak."
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OK, I know I haven't followed baseball in a long time, but I used to live right down the street from them. When did they stop being the "California Angels"? And how does any team end up with two cities in their name. That's just plain dumb.
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Marketing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Angels_of_Anaheim#Overview [wikipedia.org]
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AND IT'S CALLED... (Score:2)
What I don't understand is why this is news.
TAR PITS! (Score:3, Funny)
(Pico and Sepulveda...)
(Pico and Sepulveda...)
Doheney...
Cahuenga...
La Brea...
TAR PITS! [youtube.com]
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You just gave me a flashback to when I used to listen to Dr. Demento every Sunday evening.
Every now and then I used to be able to catch the Top 10 in syndication out here in the mid-atlantic area. But nothing is the same as 6-10 on a hot California Sunday night when I was 17-18 years old out bombing around in my '73 Nova listening to Dr. D.
old dead things (Score:3, Funny)
ziiing!
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That was covered in a story some time back on the earliest evidence of microbial life.
For those asking for metric... (Score:5, Funny)
This story is tagged "metricplease", but they didn't have the metric system in the mesozoic era. Sheesh.
Re:For those asking for metric... (Score:5, Funny)
This story is tagged "metricplease", but they didn't have the metric system in the mesozoic era. Sheesh.
They almost did!
In SE Asia they found a fossilized homo erectus, and in its hand it was holding a stone rod which was divided by carved grooves into ten equal sections, which were each then subdivided by smaller grooves into ten sections. Embedded in the specimen's skull was another rod, which was divided into twelve sections, with sixteen subdivisions.
Thus we have evidence of the oldest known metric vs imperial argument, and its resolution. While anthropologists do not know the identity of the assailant who doomed the entire pleistocene to imperial measurements, it is assumed they were an early form of Yankee.
123,000 pounds in modern money? (Score:3, Insightful)
What's that in less historic money? ;-)
interesting - do you guys over the pond use tons for big numbers or do you stick to pounds all the way up? Curious about the expression "123,000 pounds" - isn't that something like 100 tons or so? (he says plucking a figure out the air and being lazy ;-) )
Here we'd say kg for small numbers, but once we'd got to a thousand we'd shift to (metric) tons, e.g. "over 123 tons" not "over 123,000 kg". Or is that domain specific? do some things get measured in pounds all the way up, but others you shift into talking about tons? What do you measure aircraft carriers etc in? millions of pounds?
Great news though on the main topic, it will keep some university researchers happily employed for a good while!
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Aircraft carriers are measured in ounces.
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hahaha nice one :-) we of course measure them in grams or occasionally gills displacement.
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You'll probably not get any other serious replies, so here I go.
At least in my experience, the use of the unit 'ton' is most often encountered when dealing with some sort of profession that deals in things by weight. The average citizen really has no benchmark as to how much a ton of anything is, so laypeople use pounds. Large trucks and cranes are rated in tons, and scrap iron dealers, lumberjacks, etc use tons, but you don't normally hear it in everyday conversation. Interestingly, our roadway load limit [trafficsign.us]
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.
Just down the street from the La Brea tar pits (Score:2)
I don't see why this is so surprising a location - it is just down the street (Wilshire) from the La Brea tar pits.
Not fossils - bones! (Score:5, Informative)
I also gave the tar a good poking with a stick. It's easy to see how large four-legged animals would get stuck in it.
The museum also has a huge collection of sabre-tooth tigers - who thought all the stuck prey would be an easy catch....
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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 conce
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They also have a collection a humans who were either trying to drink the water floating on the tar (for those non-locals, reading this, the tar pits look like a small lake.) and thought they were smarter then the animals who tried and got stuck.
BTW, a smart human who falls in should look at the ducks that are around. It is easy to swim to the edge because people will float on both water and tar. Lay flat on your back and you don't sink. But then I bet few of the native Americans living 10,000 years ago k
Hrm, this reads like a "new" find (Score:4, Informative)
but the article says they took over 3 months to unearth them TWO YEARS ago. Kind of took a little excitement out of it to get nearly through the whole article to find out this all took place years ago. Would have been nice to have more pictures of the process and maybe an explanation as to how they found the edges of the deposits - ground penetrating radar maybe?
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There's still loads of it left that they haven't got round to yet.
Tsk. Kids today, they want their archaeologic research done at broadband speeds.
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So they had no idea what they had then and just excavated tons of dirt? Somehow I don't think so. It would seem they had some idea then what they had and an announcement of a find and innovative removal method would have been pretty cool to hear about. I stand by my initial comment - the Slashdot summary makes it sound as if this was just now found when in fact it's been ongoing research for over two years. Doesn't lessen the significance but it does tend to be less sensational when you're a little clearer
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Various bones are often tightly packed together with bones from other creatures and other matter, so until you actually remove the matrix and separate the bones, you don't know what you've got. But obviously, when part of a m
Re:Hrm, this reads like a "new" find (Score:4, Informative)
as to how they found the edges of the deposits - ground penetrating radar maybe?
Much of the area around there is just plain out dirt. The tar is in large pockets. They likely dug out the dirt. The tarpits are now surouned by a nice grass covered park. The tar is only in places where crude oil bubbles up through small cracks
The entire area at one time was an oil feild. It was such an obvious place to drill because the oil was visible at the surface. So it was drilled and pumped out in the eraly 20th century, mostly. There are a few operating wells around still.
Nearly intact? Bah! not a chance (Score:2)
OmG! (Score:2)
You killed Zeddy!!
You bastards!
10000 years from now (Score:4, Funny)
Future archaeologists are going to be confused when they find all these dinosaurs buried in Hollywood. I predict that museums by then will have huge wax models of Will Smith riding a triceratops.
oh Know (Score:2, Redundant)
another one of gods tricks to try and make us believe the world is older then 6000 years so he can send us to hell~
Award Winner (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Flintstone (Score:5, Informative)
They've found COMPLETE frozen wooly mammoths in the Artic tundra in Russia, complete with hair and all
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/03/0324_050324_mammoth.html [nationalgeographic.com]
So while this find is quite nice, it's by no means the best ever.
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If I recall correctly, the medieval Russians used to eat wholly mammoths during banquets, and mammoth ivory was an export to China.
Re:Flintstone (Score:4, Funny)
I've only ever been able to manage a partial mammoth.
Sorry, I'll get my skins.
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I think you'll find those are pygmy woolly mammoths, and that the fossil finds are of a much older subspecies.
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Uh-oh, maybe they'll have to declare all of northern Alberta [wikipedia.org] a protected archaeological site...
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Considering where it was found.
Let's do that.
Hmmm. A fossil near the La Brea Tar Pits [wikipedia.org]. Who'da thunk?
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Way to re-hash the same 'ole shit over, and over, and over. It wasn't funny a year ago, It's not funny now. Yes people think that way, everyone here knows that. You know what? The only ones I hear bringing it up every discussion I read is you guys making fun of it. The people that actually believe talk about it less.
It's off-topic and it's annoying.
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The pope? (Score:3, Informative)
I seriously don't see the link between the Pope and US puritan nuts. Or between the pope and the young-earth idiocy for that matter.
If you look as far as back as St Augustine Of Hippo [wikipedia.org], he wrote in no uncertain terms that only an idiot would take the Genesis literally. "It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in ac
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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 EX
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Re:The pope? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wrong. Making fun of religion and religious nuts is ALWAYS funny.
Especially if it involves the Pope, Texas, and a midget or two.
You bigot.....they preffer to be called "Little People"
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That just means He had them on ice for a while before he found a use for them. "These humans are going to be my most gullible creations evar! Let's see what they make of these! *snicker*"
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And by quarrying the fossils in bulk sections, the geomorphic relationship is completely lost.
That is not what I got from the article - "huge chunks of soil from the site have been removed intact and now sit in large wooden crates on the museum's back lot" precisely because "researchers are perhaps even more excited about finding smaller fossils of tree trunks, turtles, snails, clams, millipedes, fish, gophers and even mats of oak leaves. In the early 1900s, the first excavators at La Brea threw out simil
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And since this was a site that had been excavated previously in order to create the parking lot in the first place, there was probably some context lost before the specimens were found.
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> And by quarrying the fossils in bulk sections, the geomorphic relationship is completely
> lost.
I wouldn't have thought that there would be a whole lot of stratigraphy in a tar pit to begin with.
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You're wrong. I mean, look at Zed, he's bored to death.
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It depends on whether the Mammoth is European or African and what its air velocity is when hurled by a coconut.
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There is no Rio Grande River. It's the Rio Grande. Rio means river in Spanish so it would be redundant to tack river at the end of the name. Also, it's the Sierra Nevada. Shouldn't add mountains at the end as sierra means mountain range. Redundant, once again.
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Sarcasm misplaced (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, La Brea is the name of the ranch the tar was found at and obviously named for. So 'La Brea Tar Pits' is short for 'Rancho La Brea Tar Pits'. It's not redundant in this case as it's referencing a proper noun.