Credit...Weiss/Manfredi
The New York Times has a story about the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum. Climate change is at the center of many of the extinctions in Earth's past. The La Brea Tar Pit Museum in Las Angeles is researching what happened to megaspecies like mastodons, mammoths dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, and other animals about 13,000 years ago. In that effort, the museum will be remodeled to better educate the public.
“Why did two-thirds of large mammals die at the end of the Ice Age?” asks Emily Lindsey, a paleoecologist and associate curator and excavation site director at the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum, home to over 3.5 million Ice Age fossils.
Was it an exploding comet, a change in climate, or overhunting by humans? Scientists have spent years debating.
But increasingly, research indicates that a combination of extreme drought, heat and wildfires might be to blame.
And there’s an ominous link that applies to our current climate crisis: Us. Wildfires caused by ancient humans likely exacerbated those already-severe conditions. It’s a scenario that’s strikingly like today. And that’s why it’s so meaningful.
As the Tar Pits prepares for its first major redesign in decades, these findings may help the museum move from relic to relevant.
