Posted on 12/07/2009 7:19:50 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Many archaeological finds are accidentally unearthed by construction crews, as was the discovery of a 1.8 million-year-old skull of a giant ground sloth in Southern California.
Buried in the ground since the Ice Age, the skull was found by a construction crew and could be on its way to be displayed at the San Bernardino County Museum.
Work on a new site for a Southern California Edison sub-station was immediately halted when the ancient bones were discovered while earthmovers were flattening out a hilly area west of Beaumont, which is a few miles from the low desert community of Palm Springs, said Rick Greenwood director of Edison's environment health and safety division. Any company doing construction on virgin land is required by law to have an archaeologist on such work sites. It was the contracted archaeologist who noticed patches of a white substance around the fossils' location. The license also stipulates that the museum is to receive any fossils that are discovered, Greenwood said...
Sloth fossils have been discovered before, such as the ones retrieved from the La Brea Tar Pitts located in the center of Los Angeles west of downtown, but so far those are one million years younger, Reynolds said.
The museum will study the skull remains to gain information on how sloths lived, their evolution and their habitats, Reynolds said.
"Fossils are very, very rarely preserved; so many things can happen to the body of an animal when it dies," she said. "And then when you add to that the passing of more than a million years, the chances of finding a skull are just very, very low."
(Excerpt) Read more at digitaljournal.com ...
ROFLOL... I just gave Norm hell on another thread for posting her photo and claiming she was Tiger’s 11th sweetie...
...Sloth fossils have been discovered before, such as the ones retrieved from the La Brea Tar Pitts located in the center of Los Angeles west of downtown, but so far those are one million years younger, Reynolds said.
http://www.archive.org/stream/earthupheaval010880mbp/earthupheaval010880mbp_djvu.txt
The Asphalt Pit of La Brea
At Rancho La Brea, once on the western outskirts of
Los Angeles, and at present hi the immediate neighbor-
hood of the luxurious shopping center of that city, bones
of extinct animals and of still living species are found in
abundance in asphalt mixed with clay and sand. In 1875
some fossil remains of this bituminous deposit were de-
scribed for the first time. By then thousands of tons of
asphalt had already been removed and shipped to San
Francisco for roofing and paving. 1
Beds of petroleum shale (rock of laminated structure
formed by the consolidation of clay), ascribed to the
Tertiary Age, having in many places a thickness of about
two thousand feet, extend from Cape Mendocino in
northern California to Los Angeles and beyond, a dis-
tance of over four hundred and fifty miles. The asphalt
beds of Rancho La Brea are an outcrop of this large
bituminous formation.
Since 1906 the University of California has been col-
lecting the fossils of Rancho La Brea, “a most remark-
able mass of skeletal material.” When found, these fossils
were regarded as representing the fauna of the late Ter-
tiary (Pliocene) or early Pleistocene (Ice Age). The
Pleistocene strata, fifty to one hundred feet thick, over-
lie the Tertiary formations in which the main oil-bearing
beds are found. The deposit containing the fossils consists
of alluvium, clay, coarse sand, gravel, and asphalt.
Most spectacular among the animals found at Rancho
La Brea is the saber-toothed tiger (Smilodon), previously
unknown elsewhere in the New or Old World, but found
since then in other places too. The canine teeth of this
animal, over ten inches long, projected from his mouth
like two curved knives. With this weapon the tiger tore
the flesh of his prey.
The animal remains are crowded together in the asphalt
pit in an unbelievable agglomeration. In the first excava-
tion carried on by the University of California “a bed of
bones was encountered in which the number of saber-
tooth and wolf skulls together averaged twenty per cubic
yard.” 2 No fewer than seven hundred skulls of the saber-
toothed tiger have been recovered. 3
Among other animals unearthed in this pit were bison,
horses, camels, sloths, mammoths, mastodons, and also
birds, including peacocks.
In the time following the discovery of America this re-
gion of the coast was rather sparsely populated with
animals; early immigrants found only “semi-starved
coyotes and rattlesnakes.” 4 But when Rancho La Brea
received its skeletons “there lived an amazing assemblage
of animals in Western America.” 5
To explain the presence of these bones in the asphalt,
the theory was offered that the animals became entrapped
in the tar, sank in it, and were embedded in asphalt when
the tar hardened. However, the large number of animals
that filled this asphalt bed to overflowing is baffling.
Moreover, the fact that the vast majority of them are
carnivorous, whereas hi any fauna the majority of an-
imals would be herbivorous otherwise the carnivores
would have no victims for their daily food requires ex-
planation. So it was assumed that some animal, caught
in the tar, cried out, thus attracting more of its kind, and
these were trapped, too, and at their cries carnivorous
animals came, followed by more and more.
This explanation might be valid if the state of the
bones did not testify that the ensnarement of the animals
by the tar happened under violent circumstances. Oil
from which the volatile elements have evaporated leaves
asphalt, tar, and other bitumens. “As the greater number
of the animals in the Rancho La Brea beds have been en-
trapped in the tar, it is to be presumed that in a large
percentage of cases the major portion of the skeleton has
been preserved. Contrary to expectations, connected skel-
etons are not common.” 6 The bones are “splendidly”
preserved 7 in the asphalt, but they are “broken, mashed,
contorted, and mixed in a most heterogeneous mass, such
as could never have resulted from the chance trapping
and burial of a few stragglers/’ 8
Were not the herds of frightened animals found at La
Brea engulfed in a catastrophe? Could it be that at this
particular spot large herds of wild beasts, mostly carniv-
orous, were overwhelmed by falling gravel, tempests,
tides, and raining bitumen? 9 Similar finds in asphalt have
been unearthed in two other places in California, at Car-
pinteria and McKittrick; the depositions were made under
comparable circumstances. The plants of the Carpinteria
tar pits were found, with one exception, to have been
“members of the Recent flora,” or of the flora now living
200 miles to the north. 10
Separate bones of a human skeleton were also discov-
ered in the asphalt of La Brea. The skull belonged to an
Indian of the Ice Age, it is assumed. However, it does
not show any deviation from the normal skulls of Indians.
The human bones were found in the asphalt under the
bones of a vulture of an extinct species. These finds sug-
gest that the time when the human body was buried pre-
ceded the extinction of that species of vulture or at least
coincided with it; in a turmoil of elements the vulture met
its death, as did possibly the rest of its kind, with the
saber-toothed tiger and many other species and genera.
LOLOLOL!!!!!!!!
Like creepy..
That’s not, like, a picture of our glock, is it?
I doubt it as it of a much older person then Glock.
I think I may have met you and your sister at the La Brea Tar Pits when my buddy and I ventured down there from FResno 60 years ago...
No, he looks more like his brother.
“Ice Age Skull of Giant Sloth” ... weren’t they a band in the 80’s?...Album name? Should’a been!
Nope. Not my sister and I.
Sorry. So sorry.
AAAAAAAAAaahhhhhhhhh......I SEE!!!!
What’s his brother LOOK like, btw?
No picture of the skull?
And I had to be subjected to a picture of Helen Thomas just to read this thread.
No picture of the skull. Dang.
Much like the Grand Inquisitor in Monty Python, with out the face fur.
Oh. OK. Thanks. That clears up a lot.
I think that is a fair deception of the last picture of Glocks brother that I have seen in real time. He has retired and won’t be burning anyone at the stake any time soon.
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