La Brea Tar Pits

How is everyone doing this week? I'm doing great because we are talking about paleobotany today, and that's one of my favorite subjects in the entire world.

Dr. Regan Dunn from the La Brea Tar Pits joins us to talk about some of the most interesting aspects of paleobotany, and that is trying to use plants to understand how climate change impacts ecosystems and the species within them.

Dr. Dunn's work looks at really important times in Earth's history, such as the extinction of the dinosaurs, or an era of time we're gonna talk a lot about called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which has a lot of correlations to what's going on in modern times with climate change.

We also get to touch on things like what the La Brea Tar Pits teaches us about megafaunal extinctions at the end of the latest Ice Age.

This is such fascinating stuff.

It's extremely poignant and well worth listening because there's a lot of messages on why plants and the habitat they comprise are so important, and what we can learn from deep time.

I'm a longtime listener, and I love it.

Thank you.

No. Oh, no.

I went to the tar pits in La Brea Tar Pits in LA.

Did you go there?

In LA?

... of Brea, California.

Now, I've heard of l- the La Brea Tar Pits.

Mm-hmm.

Is there a connection there?

I think Brea, California, is not in Los Angeles proper-

Yeah

... and the La Brea Tar Pits are in Los Angeles proper.

Yeah.

I'm at the La Brea Melrose cross section and I can't get a signal?

I'm sinking in the La Brea tar pits and I can't get a signal.

Who am I going to call in my quicksand endeavor at the La Brea Tar Pits?

Literally no one.

It's me and a bunch of dinosaur bones.

Most bones are not going to be in this unaltered category because most of them have undergone some form of fossilization, usually something like permineralization.

However, you can have geologically young specimens, kind of like the bones that you find at La Brea Tar Pits from the Pleistocene, which are more unaltered.

We start getting into this in-between like what we talked about in the last episode where we have sub-fossil bones where they've been partially fossilized but there's still organic material present.

So there is a little bit of in-between in that but it's usually pretty young specimens unless you have something like ashfall where you have a very pristinely preserved site that may be much older but and somehow that permanentization process has been paused or slowed down in some way.

Now, these two animals live together at the same time in the same place.

A perfect example of that is the the La Brea Tar Pits out in California.

Because they find the bones of both of those animals, and they're both there preying upon animals that get stuck in that tar.

So these animals are living side by side.