This article is part of a special Fine Arts & Exhibits section on how museums, galleries and auction houses are embracing new artists, new concepts and new traditions.
los angeles – something strange happened 13,000 years ago: Giant species such as mastodons, mammoths and dire wolves suddenly disappeared.
“Why did two-thirds of all large mammals die at the end of the Ice Age?” Paleoecologist and Associate Curator at the La Brea Tar Pit & Museum, home to over 3.5 million Ice Age fossils Ask Emily Lindsay, the dig site manager.
Exploding comets, climate change, or human overfishing? Scientists have debated for years.
But a combination of extreme drought, heat, and wildfires may be responsible.
And there is an ominous connection that applies to the current climate crisis. it’s us. Wildfires caused by ancient humans may have exacerbated these already grim conditions. It’s an astonishing scenario as it is today. And that’s why it makes so much sense.
As the tar pit prepares for its first major redesign in decades, these findings could help the museum move from relic to relevance.
There was no better timing. After a year of closure due to the pandemic, the tar pits are at a crossroads.
Not far from the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the Petersen Automotive Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, this 13-acre living lab is undergoing a cultural revival with its bizarre juxtaposition of the very old and the very new along Wilshire Boulevard. increase. .
Built around a group of ancient asphalt lakes that contained and preserved over 600 species, the museum has more Ice Age fossils than any other facility, and more slime remains. So even today birds and cats are caught in the mud. It only takes a few inches to be trapped forever.
Only in LA could a 99 cent only store sit next to a subway construction. Next to prehistoric landmarks, greenish-black asphalt bubbles and methane erupts as tourists honk their car horns.
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This lost world also serves as a green space for children to marvel at statues of Smilodon and parents to have a drink during concerts spilling out of LACMA next door.
Had they known the story of the climate under their feet, they might have given up on those drinks. , may attract the masses.
According to some studies, the end of the Ice Age saw conditions that mirror today’s trends – extreme heat, drought, and fires – that dramatically changed habitats and killed off large animals.
Regan Dunn, paleobotanist and assistant curator of Tar Pits, calls the tree deaths and vegetation changes that followed during ancient drought a “big environmental warning.”
She and Dr. Lindsay study these changes across Southern California in a variety of ways, including comparing and dating charcoal and pollen cores, which show the frequency and intensity of fires.
Researchers here say that this environmental change is underway that caused the mass extinction of these species about 13,000 years ago.
“That was the beginning of today’s extinction event,” said Lori Bettyson-Varga, a geologist and president and director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, which oversees the tar pits. It’s a new story I’m trying to tell.”
How they tell their stories is critical to reaching “the people who will one day move the needle” and becoming the next generation of leaders, Dr. Dunn added.
California and the West have already suffered two decades of drought, and temperatures continue to rise. That means we are well on the same path to change that wiped out giant sloths and other large animals. Estimates vary widely, but thousands of species are already lost each year, and many more will be lost as temperatures continue to rise.
Southern California once looked like the savannah of Africa, with five species of big cats roaming here. Today there are pumas that demonstrate the scale of extinction.
Why do large animals die while smaller animals live? One theory is that smaller animals need less food. A 2016 study co-authored by Dr. Lindseythe North American extinction was at least partially the result of human influence.
Research by Tarpit Curator Emeritus John Harris Ice age plants found starving due to low carbon dioxide, that is, struggled to grow and reproduce. No trees means no cover, suggesting why herbivores and large predators died from lack of food.
If Ice Age humans were already altering the landscape and causing fires, the ways in which modern humans are altering the landscape are concerning. is to start a conversation that prompts Gives this venue additional relevance.
UCLA climate scientist Recent studies predict that a major flood could submerge Los Angeles and parts of California’s Central Valley, displacing 5 to 10 million people.
Dr. Swain warned past models sound wild but are actually downplaying threat. As such, weaving these messages into visceral narratives is difficult, especially in audience-driven museums. “Details are generally jarring. And there should be. There is a general underestimation of risk. But our goal as scientists is to talk about it before it happens.”
On a recent hot morning, the Tar Pit staff explained the many challenges of rebuilding this institution and did just that. It’s also dangerous to focus too much on today’s problems without providing answers, or to make overly bold suggestions, warns Dr. Bettyson-Varga.
“The challenge is how to present this information in a useful way to the community,” she said. “To go too far in the direction of hope is against science. But we need to bring people in.”
One plan is to allow visitors to see how fossils are excavated, cleaned and cataloged. Another is to build a bridge over the main tar pits and add a large wing to the museum to display the artifacts. Most of them are preserved.
The museum expansion will be led by Weiss Manfredi, known for designing Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park.
La Brea means tar in Spanish, but these real Fossil fuel. An oil prospector first discovered bones here in his 1800s, believing them to be livestock or other local animals.
In 1875, geologist William Denton realized that the canine teeth found here were in fact ancient and published the first scientific paper on these fossils, but Denton believed that the bones were the remains of him and his wife. The study was largely ignored because it claimed to have spoken to
As oil exploration boomed, so did discovery. There were so many fossils that the newly opened Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Arts (now the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History) collected and displayed the vast fossil collection of tar pits. Between 1913 and 1915, nearly 100 sites were excavated, yielding nearly 1 million fossils. Most excavations were confined to that period. Most new things are accidental.
In 2006, during construction of the LACMA parking lot, a nearly complete mammoth skeleton was unearthed next door. A young mammoth was discovered by workers digging a nearby subway extension in 2016. It was later given the gender-neutral name Hayden because, according to Tarr his pit scientists, no one was sure of its gender. (Harlan’s sloth pelvic bones found in another subway excavation were called Shakira.
The tar pits still hold thousands of tons of sediment boxes from past excavations and limited assistance. That means it will take years to find out everything.
Dr. Dunn, meanwhile, said much of the collection remains in “suboptimal” storage.Blue Tarp. But don’t judge a branch by its cover. This is an ancient juniper. Next to the only human remains found in the tar pits — the mysterious La Brea woman — this ordinary-looking log is one of the rarest pieces here and will be the story of the climate in future modifications. can be an important part of the story..
“It’s 29,000 years old,” said Dr. Dunn, examining it in the dim light of the vault. “special.”