Page 78 - The Restless Earth Fossils

Finding and excavating Fossils 77

that continues to clarify the relationship between dinosaurs and
modern birds. As we have seen, China is also producing fossils
from the very dawn of complex life.
Paleontologists can also expect amazing finds to come from
Venezuela. Hundreds of petroleum seeps, like the La Brea Tar Pits
in Los Angeles, dot that country’s landscape. The asphalt-rich goo
in these pits has trapped an untold number of creatures over a
period of time that stretches back two million years. The relatively
small La Brea Tar Pits have produced more than a million fossils
trapped during a 40,000-year time span. A sample excavation of
one of the Venezuelan pits (or menes) in 1998 produced 43 spe-
cies of mammals, 56 species of birds, 11 species of lizards, and 4
species of frogs in just one field season. In the future, these pits
will document important migrations of species between North
and South America and reveal how species changed as a result
of the rapid climate changes associated with the ebb and flow of
glaciers during our Pleistocene ice ages.
The shrinking ice of our modern world’s polar regions will
also expose land that has been covered in ice for millions of years.
The animals and plants that flourished there, like those found by
Tom Rich in Australia, might provide vital survival clues for those
of us who will live to experience a much warmer twenty-first
century world.

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