Zed the Mammoth and honest hard work, page 1

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Topic started on 13-6-2009 @ 05:07 PM by Kandinsky

Zed’s dead baby, Zed’s dead

In February, the NY Times published a story about the La Brea Tar Pits that catches the imagination. The findings will take a couple of years to be fully published but what they have so far is pretty interesting. During excavations to build a car park a number of bones were revealed and the subsequent and ongoing examination of the contents of the tar pits represents a new method of study.

"I knew we would find fossils . . . but I never expected to find so many deposits," Turner said. "There was an absolutely remarkable quantity and quality." There were, in fact, 16 separate deposits on the site, an amount that, by her estimate, would have taken 20 years to excavate conventionally. But with LACMA officials prodding her "to get those things out of our way" so they could build their garage, she had to find another way.

Major cache of fossils unearthed in L.A.

Instead of removing the bones from the earth, the entire site has been removed to be fully investigated…

Under the guidance of Page Museum scientists, 23 enormous intact blocks were lifted out of the earth, crated with wooden planks into “tree” boxes, which ranged in size from 5x5x5 feet (weighing 3 tons) to 12x15x10 feet (weighing 56 tons) from the sixteen asphaltic deposits salvaged from the site. Project 23: New Discoveries at Rancho La Brea gets its name from the reference to the number of extracted crates—with each box bearing its own number (1-23) and excavations for the massive new project. In recognition of their expertise, the Page Museum and the Natural History Museum were given ownership of these asphaltic deposits recovered during the course of construction.

Vast Cache Of Ice-age Fossils Uncovered At La Brea Tar Pits In Los Angeles

One of the more extraordinary finds in the crates was a mammoth that’s almost completely intact. They’ve called him Zed. One of the diggers excavating the footings for the car park sheared off a part of Zed’s skull…

All researchers know so far is that he stood about 10 feet tall at the hip and was 47 to 49 years old. Mammoths normally lived to about 60, so Zed died prematurely. Curators have found three broken ribs that were healed before his death. He probably got them from fighting with other male mammoths, “or he was just clumsy as hell,” said Shelley M. Cox, who is supervising the cleaning

Zed the Mammoth Unearthed From Under an L.A. Department Store

The crates record other critters from the late Pleistocene period of N America....

Dire Wolves (great name

)

Ground Sloth

American Lion

There's a lot of debate about when humans arrived in the Americas and even more so about how they arrived there. One thing that I admire about the early migrants is their ability to survive in hostile conditions. Coastal or Beringia routes are kind of academic when the climate, environment and predators are taken into consideration. Between the lions, wolves and short-faced bears, it must have been an adventure...