After we disembarked from our train to Los Angeles, we spent two days in L.A. and saw a bit of the city. It was fun to drive around neighborhoods, but Hollywood was disappointingly gritty and honky took. My favorite place was the La Brea Tar Pits.
In 1903, while drilling for oil, fossils were discovered in these tar pits in what is now central Los Angeles. Fossils of 35 wooly mammoths, as well as saber-toothed tigers and other extinct species have been so far discovered in the ongoing excavation. Here’s a painting of the full-sized models in the tar pit which you see as you enter (I have omitted the skyscrapers you now see in the background). Animals were lured by the water which turned out to be mixed with quicksand-like tar, and they got trapped, as the male is here. In 12,000 B.C., when the last ice age ended and humans crossed to Siberian land bridge to North America and started hunting them, these species became extinct.
