Zed's dead: LA museum unearths ice-age mammoth skull:
Excited archeologists in California are rubbing their hands: after three years' back-breaking work they are finally, painstakingly revealing the face of Zed, the ice age mammoth.
Zed is the prize find in a fossil treasure trove unexpectedly unearthed on a Los Angeles building site in 2006, when workmen digging for a new parking lot stumbled on the prehistoric beast's skull.
"The Zed deposit was actually found by a bulldozer, by a piece of heavy equipment that took off the top six inches of his skull," said Trevor Valle of the Page Museum, which has meticulously cleaned some 80 percent of Zed's bones.
"But at least they stopped before they went any further. It was better to hit a somewhat simpler area of the head than say take out the teeth or the tusks," added Valle, scraping and cleaning away at the massive head bone.
In fact the primeval mammoth is only a tiny part of a huge haul of ancient bones and fossils found during work on the underground parking lot at the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA), in busy west Los Angeles.
Saber-toothed cats, giant jaguars and long-tailed weasels are among the thousands of animal remains found in the so-called La Brea Tar Pits, one of the world's most famous fossil sites.
The "Tar" refers to the highly viscous asphalt geological layer which helped preserve the fossils for so many millennia -- and in fact which caught many of the unsuspecting animals in its sticky embrace in the first place.
"It only takes an inch and a half to two inches to totally immobilize an animal the size of a horse," explained John Harris, the British chief curator of the Page Museum.
Animals which happened to step in it "got stuck like flies on flypaper. If they were lucky they would die of hunger and thirst in a few days. If they were unlucky they'd be torn apart by a saber-toothed cat," he added cheerily.
Once the workers had stumbled upon the fossils in the underground parking lot, they had to decide what to do with them.
Provided by PhysOrg Science News
