Excavators at the La Brea Tar Pits pull, clean, and prepare fossils for research.
With 4 million specimens already in the collection, why keep excavating after more than 100 years?
We visited to see how naw specimens help build a record of the last 50,000 years.
Excavators at the La Brea Tar Pits work almost every day to pull fossils out of the ground, clean, and prepare them for further research. With 4 million specimens already in the collection, why keep excavating after more than 100 years? The La Brea Tar Pits is one of the only pale ontological sites on Earth that has preserved an entire ecosystem over time, from plants to camels to bugs. And every new fossil not only helps tell the story of the Los Angeles Basin over 50,000 years, but also gives us clues about how current species, including humans, could weather climate change in the future. We went to the La Brea Tar Pits to see how specimens are discovered, cleaned, and pieced together to build a record of the last 50,000 years.