Animals Of The Ice Age
The Page Museum, which is located at the famous Rancho La Brea Tar Pits, offers a large and diverse collection of extinct Ice Age animals and plants that roamed the Los Angeles Basin some 10,000 to 40,000 years ago.
The extinct mammals and birds were entrapped and their remains were preserved during the last of four great Ice Ages at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch. Large deposits of fossils and asphaltic sand were formed in the location by cyclic build-up over thousands of years. And the resulting asphalt was sticky enough to entrap animals, both large and small, and it also worked as something of a preservative to maintain the bones.
Since 1906, some one million bones have been recovered that represent over 231 species of vertebrates. In addition, 159 kinds of plants and 234 kinds of invertebrates have also been identified, and remains are still being excavated today. Despite the common expectation, there are no dinosaur fossils at the Page Museum.
The museum offers some thirty exhibits. Most intriguing are those of the dire wolves, wooly mammoths and saber-tooth cats, which are depicted by their assembled skeletons and through realistic-looking robotic replicas that move and roar. Younger kids may be frightened by some of these creatures. You can also watch paleontologists as they clean-up fossils that have been recently removed from the nearby pits.
There's lots of kid-friendly interaction and exhibits. Docents at stations let kids handle replicas and bones and answer questions. A tar-pulling exhibit helps parents and kids understand how difficult it would be to extract oneself from the tarpits.
The museum is not very large. Most families will probably spend between two to three hours roaming the building. Overall, the museum will appeal most to elementary school kids and older.
Ages: five and up
www.daytrum.com Editorial Staff
