Free Republic

The La Brea Fire has reached 67,092 acres and remains 10 percent contained. A slight increase in humidity helped the fire crews overnight, however the fire was very active, gaining almost 10,000 acres in about 12 hours. The evacuation order remains in effect for about 234 residences in Tepusquet, Colson, Ruiz, Moon and Eckert canyons. For all evacuation information, click here. There will be a community meeting on the fire Friday at 6:30 p.m. at the Benjamin Foxen Elementary School, located at 4949 Foxen Canyon Road in Sisquoc.

Workers excavating an underground garage on the site of an old May Co. parking structure in Los Angeles' Hancock Park got more than just a couple hundred new parking spaces. They found the largest known cache of fossils from the last ice age, an assemblage that has flabbergasted paleontologists. Researchers from the George C. Page Museum at the La Brea tar pits have barely begun extracting the fossils from the sandy, tarry matrix of soil, but they expect the find to double the size of the museum's collection from the period, already the largest in the world. Among their finds,...

Scientists went to work digging for fossils at La Brea Tar Pits, digging the tooth of a 5-foot (1.5-meter) dire wolf and the toe of a sabertooth tiger from the sticky prehistoric asphalt near downtown Los Angeles. About 10,000 years before the arrival of mammoth traffic jams in the second-largest U.S. city, the two beasts likely got stuck in the goo while hunting a camel, horse or ground sloth, said John Harris, chief curator and head of vertebrate studies at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, which oversees the site. ''It's one of the, if not the, richest...