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Oh, so they’ve discovered sloths in SoCal. Big whoop. Over a third of the current SoCal population are sloths.
Damn, we should apply for a grant to study it... Gravy Train!!!
...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.