Sedimental Values: Digging In to La Brea’s Past
In Los Angeles, California sits the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits, an abundant late Pleistocene (last Ice Age) fossil site. Paleontologists have been collecting and cataloguing fossils at the site since 1913. A large challenge for modern museums is the digitization of their collection records. Buried within a hundred years of typed pages of fossils and geology samples from La Brea are data about exactly where and how each specimen was found in the ground. Sedimental Values will capture 40 years of fossil field data from Pit 91, allowing the museum to plan for preparation and curation of this period of collection. The project will allow the curators, researchers, and students to ask new, richer research questions about Paleoecology in Southern California.