"At a particularly low point, ex-star Davis takes a job at the May Company on Wilshire, but learns the hard way that bad judgment and youthful clothes are the real impediments to the comeback dreams of an aging actress."
<http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-sci-fossils18-2009feb18,0,3021735.story>http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-sci-fossils18-2009feb18,0,3021735.story
Major cache of fossils unearthed in L.A.
A nearly intact mammoth, dubbed Zed, is among the remarkable discoveries near the La Brea tar pits. It's the largest known repository of Pleistocene ice age fossils. By Thomas H. Maugh II
February 18, 2009
Workers excavating an underground garage on the site of an old May Co. parking structure in Los Angeles' Hancock Park got more than just a couple hundred new parking spaces. They found the largest known cache of fossils from the last ice age, an assemblage that has flabbergasted paleontologists.
Researchers from the George C. Page Museum at the La Brea tar pits have barely begun extracting the fossils from the sandy, tarry matrix of soil, but they expect the find to double the size of the museum's collection from the period, already the largest in the world.
Among their finds, to be formally announced today, is the nearly intact skeleton of a Columbian mammoth -- named Zed by researchers -- a prize discovery because only bits and pieces of mammoths had previously been found in the tar pits.
But researchers are perhaps even more excited about finding smaller fossils of tree trunks, turtles, snails, clams, millipedes, fish, gophers and even mats of oak leaves. In the early 1900s, the first excavators at La Brea threw out similar items in their haste to find prized animal bones, and crucial information about the period was lost.
"This gives us the opportunity to get a detailed picture of what life was like 10,000 to 40,000 years ago" in the Los Angeles Basin, said John Harris, chief curator at the Page. The find will make the museum "the major library of life in the Pleistocene ice age," he said.
Because of its need for haste, the team also is pioneering a new technique for extracting the fossils. Most paleontologists spend days to weeks carefully sifting through the soil at the site of a dig. In this case, however, huge chunks of soil from the site have been removed intact and now sit in large wooden crates on the museum's back lot. The 23 crates -- ranging in size from that of a desk to that of a small delivery truck -- are responsible for the excavation's informal name, Project 23.
The site of the old two-story parking garage, which was used by the now-defunct May Co. department store, is now owned by the Page's neighboring museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. LACMA had razed the building to construct an underground parking garage that would restore parkland above the structure.
The entire Rancho La Brea area at Hancock Park is a paleontological treasure chest. Petroleum from the once-massive underground oil fields oozed to the surface over the millennia, forming bogs that trapped and killed unsuspecting animals and then preserved their skeletons. It is now a protected site, although dispensation was granted to build the new garage.
Because of the historic nature of the area, the work had to be overseen by a salvage archaeologist. In this case, the work fell to Robin Turner, founder of ArchaeoPaleo Resource Management Inc. of Culver City, which previously had overseen work on other sites at or near the tar pits. Her group hit pay dirt when the excavation got about 10 feet below the surface.
"I knew we would find fossils . . . but I never expected to find so many deposits," Turner said. "There was an absolutely remarkable quantity and quality."
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