The 23rd June was a great day - we went to La Brae Tar Pits (La Brae translates to "The Tar") where they recovered thousands of Ice Age skeletons preserved in Tar.

It is in the middle of a built up area (maybe 5 miles from LA centre) and tar (well, really Asphalt) just starts oozing from the ground at random. So when touring around the park one would come across a garden bed where there'd be all this oozing black stuff coming out the ground.

We spent a number of ours looking around the museum, at all the things they've retrieved from the pit. The museum also had displays on the history of the pits, its various owners and the amazing discoveries. We also took a guided tour ourside in the surrounding park where the guide showed us the tar oozing out of different places and telling us which pits they'd discovered different bones in.

We asked at the gift shop where we could get a sample of the asphalt to take home and they gave us a plasitc bag and told us to just take some from wherever we wanted! It was amusing that there are no Dinosaur bones in the pits, but the gift shop mainly sells Dinosaur paraphenalia.

They are still retrieving bones, though are taking it a lot slower so that they don't miss microfossils (seeds, shells, etc). To be allowed to volunteer to help in the excavation of Pit 91 (the main excavation) one needs to have spent 95 hours volunteering in the laboratory.

In the museum, they had a wall with 404 Dire Wolf skulls on display! The Dire Wolf is related to the Timber Wolf that now lives in California. Until the early 1900's the owners, and even scientists, thought that the bones in the pits were cattle or horse bones and just ignored them.