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THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 



followed by his mates, to the edge of the pool, 

 and dancing about in wild excitement yelped 

 out his opinions of sabre-tooth tigers in 

 general and this one in particular, before 

 taking advantage of his adversary's helpless- 

 ness to spring in upon him and devour him. 

 The harassed sabre-tooth sinking slowly down 

 can respond only by a succession of snarls as 

 he tries vainly to disengage his terrible claws 

 to strike at his enemy. 



Here the picture stands, as we have at- 

 tempted to reproduce it in the American 

 Museum's "Asphalt Group" exhibit. The 

 tragedy, whose course has been outlined in 

 fanc}^ in the above sketch, was repeated again 

 and again in the treacherous asphalt pools of 

 La Brea during the course of the Pleistocene 

 involving thousands upon thousands of ani- 

 mals large and small. Finally, the petroleum 

 springs became less active, the pools dried up 

 in part so as to be no longer a serious menace 

 to the animals that ventured upon them, and 

 in our time only a few minor springs remain, 

 dangerous occasionally still to small animals, 

 while the chimneys or openings of the ancient 



springs are filled with a half-hardened asphalt, 

 of the consistency of brown sugar, and packed 

 full from bottom to top with the bones and 

 skulls of extinct animals and birds, perfectly 

 preserved from decay by the asphalt that 

 surrounds and permeates them. More than 

 two hundred skulls of the great sabre-tooth 

 tiger, the especial subject of this sketch, have 

 been exhumed by the University of California; 

 nearly a thousand by the Los Angeles Muse- 

 um. The great wolf is even more abundant, 

 and many skulls and skeletons of extinct 

 horses, camels, bisons, ground sloths, and nu- 

 merous smaller animals, besides the remains of 

 over fifty kinds of birds, have been obtained 

 from the pits. Animals and birds of prey are 

 much more numerous than the rest, indicating 

 that the struggling victims served as a lure 

 to decoy many more to share their fate. It 

 is a singular fact that although the southern 

 mammoth, or extinct elephant, is known to 

 have been common in the region at the time, 

 its remains are not found in the asphalt de- 

 posits except at one locality where seven skele- 

 tons were crowded together in a single pit. 



