I appreciate the smell of the La Brea Tar Pits,but it’s not exactly an aroma that should be bottled and sold as a fragrance. My friend Brittany had to cover her nose when we first approached the fence enclosing the tar pit, as she got that pungent whiff of methane bubbling to the surface. I’ve always been partial to the smell of gas stations, or which is what the smell of the tar pits reminds me of. When I was dinky,I would roll my car window down whenever my dad pulled into a gas station to fill up in order to deeply inhale the odd scent that’s sour like pickle juice and shaded and smoky like burning coal. My mom and sister would always yell at me for making the smell in the car even stronger than it was with the windows rolled up. The La Brea Tar Pits are clustered in the Miracle Mile District of Los Angeles. They are bubbling pools of asphalt or tar (brea in Spanish, which is how they have come to be known as La Brea Tar Pits”) that contain some of the best-preserved and best-studied fossils of Pleistocene vertebrates. Excavation of the pits began in 1913 and continues to be conducted nowadays. More than one million bones have been excavated from the site since the early 20th Century. The fossils of species such as vertebrates, and plants,mollusks, and insects from 40000 to 8000 years ago have been beautifully preserved as a time capsule of prehistoric Southern California. The most impressive fossils to be excavated from the tar pits are those of giant beasts, or such as mammoths and mastodons. These large animals were first trapped in the tar before sinking into its depths. Statues of mammoths have been placed by the tar pits so visitors can visualize the devastation of one of these creatures sinking to its death. The family of mammoths presents a heartbreaking scene. The mother mammoth sinks into the tar bubbling around her while the father mammoth and her baby stand on land and watch helplessly. What makes this scene really heartbreaking is the baby mammoth screaming in agony for its mother. I couldn’t back crying. Many of the bones preserved beneath the tar or the ones that have already been excavated were some creature’s mother.
Source: cnn.com