FEATURES IN 



gas to escape. Since the first accumulation of the 

 asphalt, there has been very frequent trapping of 

 animals coming in contact with the sticky pools. 

 Wherever oil is exuded at the present time we find 

 birds, gophers, squirrels, dogs, and even cattle fre- 

 quently entangled. This process has led to the 

 accumulation of great quantities of remains of ani- 

 mals in times past. In many of the pits the 

 bones are found massed and matted together in 

 enormous numbers. Literally hundreds of thou- 

 sands of specimens have been obtained from these 

 deposits. The photograph shown on Plate XI illus- 

 trates a typical occurrence in one of the University 

 of California excavations. The great number of 

 specimens are shown in place, exactly as found. 



The representation of ancient life at Rancho La 

 Brea comprises numerous species, the total number 

 amounting to considerably more than one hundred 

 forms. These include an extinct bison, an extinct 

 antelope, an elephant, a mastodon, extinct species of 

 horse and camel, a sabre-tooth tiger, a giant cat 

 closely related to the existing lion, great numbers of 

 extinct wolves and coyotes, a gigantic bird with 

 characters to some extent intermediate between the 

 eagle and condor, many condors, vultures, owls, 

 eagles, hawks, and a great variety of other birds 

 and mammals. There are also remains of toads, 

 and snakes, insects, thousand-legged worms, many 

 leaves, and twigs of large plants, and even consid- 

 erable parts of tree-trunks with the attached limbs. 



The bones are all as perfectly preserved as 

 though buried within the past few years; they can 

 be assembled in complete skeletons which may be 

 multiplied to hundreds in the principal collections. 

 Several of the animals represented in such abun- 

 dance at Rancho La Brea were known only by rare 

 or fragmentary material before the discovers of this 

 deposit, so that the opportunity for study onered in 

 the Rancho La Brea collection is unusual. 



The wonderful Rancho La Brea fauna obtained 

 from the asphalt pits comes from deposits accum- 

 ulated in the Pleistocene period, which preceded 

 the present day by many thousands of years. As oil 

 and asphalt are constantly being exuded from the 

 soil in this region, it is natural that in some locali- 

 ties deposits of the present day, and stages between 

 the present and Pleistocene, may be associated with 

 the older deposits of Pleistocene time. 



Good specimens representing the principal ani- 

 mals of Rancho La Brea are to be seen at the Mu- 

 seum of History, Science and Art in Los Angeles, 

 and at the University of California in Berkeley. 



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