Death Trap
Impatient drivers stuck in traffic on the 405 would not be comforted to know that creatures have been trapped by Los Angeles asphalt for many millennia. The famed La Brea Tar Pits sit right at the the heart of LA’s urban sprawl, a location where the Los Angeles Basin’s massive petroleum deposits bubble to the surface as naturally occurring asphalt. This “tar” is sometimes accompanied by water from springs, forming sticky pools. During the Pleistocene, these deceitful watering holes attracted and trapped a wide range of fauna, everything from tiny rodents and birds all the way to immense megafauna such as Columbian mammoths and Pacific mastodons. These unfortunates were then exquisitely preserved by the petroleum-rich muck.
Today, the site is a park and museum complex that preserves and presents this unique deposit to the public. The George C. Page Museum has both unique architecture and unique exhibits of fossils excavated from the pits, including one of the most strikingly arranged sets of bones in the world: a backlit orange wall full of dozens and dozens of dire wolf skulls. New fossils are still being prepared from (relatively) recent excavations and the collections continue to grow.
Visitors may spot small tar mounds and pockets of bubbling asphalt around the grassy park. These seeps are sometimes marked off by orange caution cones to prevent a modern entrapment, though it is unlikely that anyone would lose more than a shoe. A shallow lake just outside the museum offers a dramatic vignette of the tar pits in action. Although technically the remnants of a human-made asphalt extraction operation, “Lake Pit” is covered in bubbling tar and features iconic fiberglass sculptures of three mammoths. Created by Howard Ball, this heart-rending scene shows a mother mammoth frantically struggling against the tar in the lake, while her mate and plaintive baby watch on in distress from the shoreline.
This cover is roughly based on this classic scenario, set against an orange-y California sunset.