Mckittrick Tar Seeps

[cloudyhere]

Well, I'm back from my trip to the tar pits and we found some ...stuff. However, we aren't sure how old it actually is because it could be fresh bones just covered with tar. We got there in the morning and just had no idea where to look so we spent about 4 hours just walking around the area trying to find any signs of fossils. By the time we finally found tiny bits of bone it was close to 2 pm and getting hot as hell so we didn't have much time left since we were both about to die from heatstroke.

Anyway, here's what we found:

Some small bones, I'm guessing birds or rodents

Here's some kind of beetle. It is extremely brittle and I had found another that kind of disintegrated when I picked it up.

This is the kind of area we were looking at in the beginning but it didn't yield much. If anyone has been there before and can give me some advice as to where to look or what kind of rock to dig through, it'd be really helpful. I hope to go back again at some point when I have a better idea of the specific location

Cheers!

[Auspex]

The bone in the second pic (the one in matrix) looks hollow and thin-walled enough to be bird (but too fragmentary for me to tell much more). Is the end on the third bone white? If so, it argues for a fairly recent origin, in that it was never completely entombed.

[mommabetts]

cool

[FossilForKids]

When I physically get better I will meet you there and show you how to dig for the stuff and what to look for. It will still be hard for you to gauge how old the stuff is except that you'll find some of it under the ground. I can then take you to Kettleman which is just up the road from there if you like Sand Dollars and lots of them.

John

[cloudyhere]

Auspex: I agree, that particular bone was sticking out of the asphalt and although I like to think that it could have been bleached due to exposure, chances are it's probably pretty recent.

mommabetts: Thanks!

John: That sounds amazing and I look forward to meeting you in person! Just let me know when you want to go.

The problem with this particular location is that there's not a lot of information on it. Google only turned up a few websites with very general information and as far as I could tell, the only references to fossil hunting there is on this forum.

We asked around the town while we were there for lunch about the tar pits and fossil hunting but it seemed like nobody knew much about it. Most of them didn't even know where the pits were. They pointed us in the direction of the Chevron Productions Office and we headed there hoping they would be able to tell us more about the tar seeps since they owned a lot of the land in the area. The people at Chevron were super nice! After we explained our situation, a guy named Harry took us through their offices (it was nice to get out of the sun and into an air conditioned building) and introduced us to a few people who told us more about the seeps. A woman who worked there had a a daughter who found a piece of a sabre tooth just walking around the hills. We were hoping to talk to one of their engineers who knew more about geology but he had just played basketball and was in the shower :/

We also met an old fella named Herb on the hills who was hoping to take photos of the tar seeps bubbling for some sort of website or documentary. He told us that he dug fossils out of the lighter colored hills along the road 60 years ago which confused me because I thought everything was preserved in bitumen/asphaltum. The lighter colored hills were a different sediment. Maybe his memory was a bit fuzzy because 60 years is a long time and I don't even remember what I did 20 years ago lol

We also went to a bar that had all the surfaces covered in pennies...hundreds of thousands of pennies. Even the floor was covered! I wish we had gotten some pictures of the place but by then we were really tired/hot and forgot all about the camera.

[siteseer]

First, July is the worst time to collect there because the tar is can be goopy (technical term) then and it's generally at least 100 degrees in Kern County any day that month. You want to check out the area on a cool day in December-February. You will find a scattering of rodent and bird bones near the surface. Those are probably recent though. In fact, even as you dig, that may be all you find. The large Pleistocene vertebrates tend to be found in pockets so you have to be diligent and lucky. I was once told that the large mammals were more common in Maricopa rather than McKittrick but I've seen those from the latter as well.

You have to do some university library work to find articles on McKittrick (Googling goes only irregularly into the past as most journal articles have yet to be scanned). Some people say they went to the library but came up empty but it usually means they didn't go. Some articles are legitimately elusive because the source publication may not be directly accessible at many libraries. Here are two articles to look for:

Miller, S.E. 1983.

Late Quaternary insects of Rancho La Brea and McKittrick, California. Quaternary Research. 20: pp. 90-104. I don't have a copy of this but remember it had few if any photos.

Church, C.C. 1968.

The McKittrick Tar Seeps . 1968 Guidebook. Geology and Oilfields. West Side Southern San Joaquin Valley. Pacific Sections. AAPG. SEG. SEPM. pp. 86-92. This one has a quick overview of the geology and a bit about the history of oil and paleo research.

You can go to your local public library and they might be able to help you get copies through the inter-library loan service. I used it to get an oddball French article about megalodon teeth from New Caledonia once, but another time, I never heard back regarding a search for something I thought would be easier to track down.

There are also a number of articles about Rancho La Brea in back issues of Terra magazine (LA County Museum used to publish it - last release was in 2001).