5 Coolest New Fossils Discovered in the La Brea Tar Pits (PHOTOS)

By Simone Wilson Fri., Mar. 11 2011 at 6:00 PM

Anyone seen my vertebrae?

This was a tough race, considering 16,000 fossils have been pried from the ground beneath L.A.'s metropolitan Page Museum since 2007. The first round of catalogued bones was just announced Wednesday, and they've all got one thing in common: They're really ridiculously cool-looking.

But after chatting with collections manager Aisling Farrell for a spell (cool job, cool name, no biggie), we've managed to identify our five favorites --

All from 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, around the end of the last Ice Age.

So here they are, from cool to coolest, complete with big beautiful museum photos and the occasional factoid with which to impress the pensive chick with thick rims in the corner cubicle who deep-down wishes she'd grown up to be ~~an archeologist~~ a paleontologist:

5. Giant jaguar skull.

Page Museum

What's not cool about a giant jaguar skull? Get a load of those sexy Shere Kahn eye sockets. Farrell says the panthera atrox -- the largest cat in history -- is one of her favorites, mostly due to its obscurity. "Carnivores, the world over, in the fossil record, are generally rare," she says. "This is our first real, most complete panthera. There are only a handful of them across North America."

And if that's not enough to turn you on: "There's still controversy and debate regarding its origins and its lifestyle," says Farrell.

Tags:

archaeology, bones, fossils, gopher, La Brea tar pits, mammoth, Page Museum, sabertooth

We Recommend

miguelconcepcion

Thank you for keeping us posted with your new discoveries...will be in Los next week and will definitely spend a few hours @ the Pits!

LungBung

Wow,this makes a lot of sense dude.

www.anon-tools.es.tc

busterhyman

I hate it when people make posts just to put their web domain at the bottom. Your account should banned!

ArchaeoGal

I think you mean palaeontologist and not archaeologist. The former studies fossils and the latter studies humans.

Simone Wilson

Wow, thanks. I feel dumb. =)

Smokin1

would really like much more work done with horse fossils. The horse evolved only on north america and is about the only ice age animal still here.(besides man) Horses and man, side by side.

marijoca

I'm confused, I thought that the indigenous people in the Americas were astounded to see conquistadores mounted on horses, because they had never seen horses and thought these armor clad people on these beasts were Gods or something. Were horses extinct by the time people inhabited the Americas? Anybody know for sure?

korkma ampul sonmez

Horses evolved in America, but then they went extinct, I think about 10-50K years ago when the first humans came to America. The horses and other large animals of americas did not evolve along with humans for millions of years. Therefore they went extinct quickly once they contacted humans. Much later, the spanish came to america, and then the indigenous people saw horses first time in their lifetimes.

Angela Garcia as NeonMosfet

They say there was a small Ice Age from 11500to 12800 ya.Younger Dryas Stadial. A lot of animals went extinct.

Angela Garcia as NeonMosfet

marijoca

Thank you Korkma, and very interesting. I'm glad I wasn't misinforming people when I would say that there were no horses in the Americas when it was conquered by Europeans.Now I can be really as excited as some paleontologists if horses' fossils are found. That would be special.