File:The American Museum journal (c1900-(1918)) (17538881794).jpg

Title: The American Museum journal
Identifier: americanmuseumjo16amer (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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472 THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL followed by his mates, to the edge of the pool, and dancing about in wild excitement yelped out his opinions of sabre-tooth tigers in general and this one in particular, before taking advantage of his adversary's helpless- ness to spring in upon him and devour him. The harassed sabre-tooth sinking slowly down can respond only by a succession of snarls as he tries vainly to disengage his terrible claws to strike at his enemy. Here the picture stands, as we have at- tempted to reproduce it in the American Museum's "Asphalt Group" exhibit. The tragedy, whose course has been outlined in fanc)^ in the above sketch, was repeated again and again in the treacherous asphalt pools of La Brea during the course of the Pleistocene involving thousands upon thousands of ani- mals large and small. Finally, the petroleum springs became less active, the pools dried up in part so as to be no longer a serious menace to the animals that ventured upon them, and in our time only a few minor springs remain, dangerous occasionally still to small animals, while the chimneys or openings of the ancient springs are filled with a half-hardened asphalt, of the consistency of brown sugar, and packed full from bottom to top with the bones and skulls of extinct animals and birds, perfectly preserved from decay by the asphalt that surrounds and permeates them. More than two hundred skulls of the great sabre-tooth tiger, the especial subject of this sketch, have been exhumed by the University of California; nearly a thousand by the Los Angeles Muse- um. The great wolf is even more abundant, and many skulls and skeletons of extinct horses, camels, bisons, ground sloths, and nu- merous smaller animals, besides the remains of over fifty kinds of birds, have been obtained from the pits. Animals and birds of prey are much more numerous than the rest, indicating that the struggling victims served as a lure to decoy many more to share their fate. It is a singular fact that although the southern mammoth, or extinct elephant, is known to have been common in the region at the time, its remains are not found in the asphalt de- posits except at one locality where seven skele- tons were crowded together in a single pit.
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