by Katherine Glover In this post, I’ll discuss the vegetation reconstruction of our project. Modeling is how we use data generated from plant labwork (pollen and macrofossil identification), and obtain estimates of plant abundance and biomass, and net primary productivity (NPP). Both of these outputs are important for the project's next stage: modeling the food … Continue reading Modeling plants of the past
We found 49 film and tv references to tar pits. Did we miss any??
How often does the Tar Pits feature in pop culture?? Turns out, it pops up in lots of movies!
The La Brea Tar Pits might be best known for the saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, and mammoths that have been excavated from our grounds, but it is in the matrix surrounding fossils of these large animals that we find innumerous microfossils critical to our “Mouse’s Eye View” research. Plant pieces, shells, insect parts, and the … Continue reading Microfossil sorting with a little help from our friends
This post is adapted from a 2014 post by Dr. Jacquelyn Gill (originally posted on The Contemplative Mammoth). Jacquelyn is overseeing the plant component of our ice age food webs. As a scientist, there are places I want to visit one day because they feature heavily into the intellectual mythology of my field: Darwin's Down … Continue reading Stuck in the past: the science of the La Brea Tar Pits
Our inaugural blog post is by Dr. Jessica Blois at UC Merced, who is overseeing the small mammal portion of our project. Welcome to our new project website! To get things started, we thought we’d first describe the what, why and how of our project. In future posts, we’ll explore these topics in more depth. … Continue reading Assessing millennial-scale community dynamics using mammal and vegetation food webs
La Brea Tar PITS: A Mouse's Eye view 