Los Angeles, a city I once resided in, a place where the natural world composes a significantly different dance than where I had grown up. Right in the center of this restless, dust-filled metropolis lies an often over-looked feature: the La Brea Tar Pits, an ancient wound in the earth that has been bubbling for tens of thousands of years.
Step close and you can smell it... a faint petroleum tang rising from the ground. Look long enough and you might see a bubble break the surface, as if something beneath the tar is exhaling after centuries of holding its breath. A place, a cauldron of time and history.
A History Written in Asphalt and Bone
The La Brea Tar Pits, La Brea meaning “the tar” in Spanish, have been capturing life for more than 50,000 years. Contrary to popular imagination, that life wasn’t typically giant mammoths plunging headfirst into pools of black goo; instead, the reality is more accidental.
Demonstrating Darwinism at it`s finest, animals would wander in, get stuck for a moment, for panic to sink in as they slowly were entrapped...millimeter by millimeter. Predators, sensing easy prey, would rush to the scene, only to be caught themselves. What remains is a record of the ecology of an ancient Los Angeles, a picture of life preserved with a completeness no other site on Earth can match.
Today, digging continues at Project 23, a set of massive excavation crates discovered during construction. Scientists sift through thousands of bones, seeds, insects, and microfossils to reconstruct a world that existed before Hollywood, before highways, before humans ever set foot on California soil.
Why the Tar Pits Matter in the 21st Century
The La Brea Tar Pits aren’t just an archaeological spectacle, they’re a record of climate change. The same species that roamed Ice Age Los Angeles, dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, American lions, vanished as the earth warmed rapidly at the end of the Pleistocene.
By studying their bones, scientists are learning how ecosystems respond to warming climates, disappearing habitats, and shifting food webs. The Tar Pits have become an unexpected study for the future, a reminder that extinction is not a myth or distant threat, but instead, a pattern.
In a strange twist, this sticky remnant of time is helping us understand what lies ahead.
Fun and Weird Facts Buried in the Asphalt
Los Angeles is still leaking.
The asphalt that bubbles up isn’t in the past- it’s active. Some sidewalks around Hancock Park ooze tar even today. Residents occasionally find sticky surprises on their shoes, car tires, or pets.
Most fossils are… dogs.
Not the dire kind, though over 4,000 dire wolves have been found, but modern domestic dogs who wandered in long after the Ice Age ended.
There are insects preserved with their wings mid-flutter.
The pits capture life in motion. Tiny beetles, pollen grains, and plant seeds have been recovered in pristine detail.
A saber-toothed cat skull was once found… in a trash bag.
No one knows how it got there but it became one of the most complete specimens ever cataloged. If you have lived In Los Angeles before, somehow this is unsurprising.
Tar and asphalt aren’t the same thing.
The pits are made of naturally occurring asphalt, thicker, more viscous, full of life and trapped gases.
The Place That Holds Its Breath
What makes the La Brea Tar Pits so haunting isn’t the bones or the sulfur smell, but it’s the feeling that the past is close enough to touch. You stand at the fence surrounding the lake pit and realize that the ground beneath your shoes is the same ground that once supported the various forms of life that tread the Earth long before you and I.
Los Angeles is often a city of constant change, neighborhoods reinvent themselves, buildings vanish, dreams dissolve. But here, the earth remembers everything. It archives fur, bone, plant matter, footprints, life.
At the La Brea Tar Pits, time is not linear.
It’s suspended, sticky.
A teacher of the past, present and future.
The Tar Pits, The Birthed Inspiration
Earth being a long-standing and forever more muse, I wanted to capture the allure of La Brea in my own work. As if dredged from the depths themselves, I took the Snake Vertebrae Hoops and hand painted each nook of bone with 3 layers of India ink (an ink made from carbon), applied a sealant and later dipped in a blanket of resin to emulate the pits.
These Tar Pit Snake Vertebrae Earrings capture the same mystery of what lurks in the depths of La Brea, and pair with an endless array of styles. Each pair is one of a kind, just like the specimens collected from the Earth.
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