File:The American Museum journal (c1900-(1918)) (17540018233).jpg

Title: The American Museum journal
Identifier: americanmuseumjo13amer (find matches)
Year: c1900-(1918) (c190s)
Authors: American Museum of Natural History
Subjects: Natural history
Publisher: New York : American Museum of Natural History
Contributing Library: American Museum of Natural History Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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Excavating for fossils at La Brea. Many white weathered fragments of bone tered over the surface. Oil-wells in the distance larger and more numerous and formed a death-trap of terrible efficiency for the numerous animals that inhabited the valleys and plains of that region. This was in the Pleistocene Period, during the Glacial Epoch, when much of the northern part of the continent was buried under great fields of ice. Southern California, far below the southern limits of glaciation had probably a less arid climate than now, and a very large and varied animal population, mostly of extinct species and some of them very widely different from the living animals of the region. Excavations for road asphalt in this formation were commenced in 1874 by Major Hancock, the owner of the ranch. The material was melted down to free it from impurities and shipped in barrels to San Francisco and else- where. The work was not continued as the cost of purifying the product was too high for it to find a profitable market at that time. It served to call attention to the fact that the asphalt contained numerous bones or fragments of bones, and when examined by scientists it appeared that these were not modern bones but belonged to extinct animals. Prospecting for fossils soon showed that around the little oil springs or where springs had formerly come up, there were pipes or chimneys of soft asphalt, which were veritable ossuaries, packed full of the bones of these extinct animals, mostly in marvelous preservation. The excavations of the local scientific societies and the more extensive work carried on by the University of California have yielded many hundreds of skulls and tens of thousands of skeleton bones, of a great variety of animals large and small. The bones are impregnated with asphalt, otherwise little altered; but flesh and hide, horns and hoofs 293

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