Los Angeles is a city rich in history. Walk down almost any street and you can find traces of the Hollywood stars that have made the city famous since the beginning of the silver screen.
But Los Angeles’ history goes back far before the invention of movies, and during a recent construction project, builders and a group of scientists discovered the city’s 10,000-year-old secret history…
The Purple Line Extension
On November 11, 2014, construction began on a multi-billion dollar project called the Purple Line Extension, or the Westside Subway Extension, began in Los Angeles. The project, which is scheduled to be complete in 2026, will add about 7 miles of new subway service to the city of Los Angeles.
Protecting The Environment
Because California has strict laws to protect the environment, scientists are required to be on site at certain construction projects, especially projects like the Purple Line where there will be major digging. So when construction began on November 11, Ashley Leger, a paleontologist, was there to witness the groundbreaking…
Inhabited Land
While most paleontologists spend their time digging through remote deserts and uninhabited plains around the world, Ashley works to find fossils in the middle of cities with a company, Cogstone Resource Management, that Los Angeles transportation officials contracted to help supervise their subway extension project.
An Important Job
Because they dig into an area that has never been dug so deeply, Ashley and her colleagues were on site to make sure any bones or fossils that the construction crews came across didn’t get destroyed and were properly removed from the earth to be studied…
A Treasure Trove
“This treasure trove is coming out of an area where you don’t usually get to dig a giant 80-foot-deep pit,” said Ashley, who waits each day until she gets a notification on her phone to go down to the construction site. Some days, the crews don’t find anything during their excavation so she’s not needed at the site.
Waiting For The Next Find
But on the days Ashley does get a notification, she puts on her hard hat, vest, and goggles and descends far below the busy streets of Los Angeles. “They’re making sure that they’re recovering every single fossil that could possibly show up,” Ashley said…
Blast From The Past
“They call me anytime things are large and we need to lead an excavation,” Ashley said about the important work she and her colleagues do at the excavation site. Since work began on the subway extension project, Ashley and the team of paleontologists have recovered the remains and fossils of animals that walked the land that would become Los Angeles, California around 10,000 years ago.
Small Discoveries
Each time Ashley gets the notification to come down to the site, she and her team are bursting with excitement at the idea of what they will find. After a few months, they managed to find a mastodon tooth, a tooth and ankle bone from a horse, bison vertebrae, a piece of a rabbit jaw, and a camel foreleg…
A Late-Night Find
While all of those finds were exciting, they weren’t the big find that Ashley hoped for during the project. So when she got a notification on her phone late 1 night as she was getting ready for bed, she wasn’t sure what to expect.
The Call
According to Ashley, she was just about to get into bed for the night when she got a call from 1 of her monitors. “It looks big,” he told her,” the man told her. Ashley couldn’t contain her excitement at what they had found, so the next morning, she arrived at the site bright and early…
The Work Begins
Ashley got down on her hands and started to inspect the ground as the construction crews were diverted to let her work. “Our crews try to be as mindful as possible to help them do their jobs. We get out of their way,” said Dave Sotero, spokesman for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
A 15-Hour Excavation
Normally, work has to be diverted for a few hours at most when a fossil or bones are uncovered. This time, however, it took nearly 15 hours before Ashley was finished with her work and the construction workers were finally able to continue their digging and building…
Ashley’s ‘Big Find’
At first, Ashley thought the crews had unearthed part of an elephant skull. But as she carefully started brushing away the dirt, her heart started racing. The skull that she first believed to have belonged to an elephant was actually an intact skull of a juvenile mammoth.
The Mammoth Skull
After Ashley and the crew spent 15 hours carefully brushing the dirt away from the skull, which she calls her ‘big find’, her team and the construction crews worked together to carefully transport the skull from the digging site to Los Angeles’ La Brea Tar Pits and Museum to be studied…
A Paleontologist’s Dream
“It’s an absolute dream come true for me,” said Ashley, who spent a decade searching the South Dakota mammoth site without ever finding anything significant. “It’s the one fossil you always want to find in your career,” she explained.
A Rare Specimen
Not only was the find exciting for Ashley because only 30 mammoths have been found in the Los Angeles area, but mammoth skulls are rarely ever found intact without damage to the tusks. The mammoth skull that Ashley and the crew discovered was in perfect condition with both tusks attached…
A Mammoth Named Hayden
After being unearthed, Ashley and the crew decided to name the 8- to 12-year-old Colombian mammoth ‘Hayden’ after actress Hayden Panettiere since she was on a TV monitor on the construction site when the skull was found.
On Display
After being carefully transported about a mile to the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum, the mammoth skull is still being studied and examined in a glass-walled Fossil Lab that allows the public to view Hayden as scientists complete their work…
The Work Continues
Meanwhile, work on the Purple Line Extension is still underway and Ashley and the team of paleontologists are working hard to preserve all the fossils and bones that they find. “We’ve got mammoths and mastodons on one end. We’re finding horses over here. It’s been really fun,” said Ashley. “Fossils are always rare. We estimate that less than 1 percent of life on Earth actually fossilizes. So the fact that we get anything is incredible.”
The History Of Los Angeles
The mammoth skull was discovered about 25 feet below the streets of Beverly Hills, but as the digging goes deeper, Ashley has been finding traces of animals that inhabited the area hundreds of thousands of years ago when Los Angeles was under water. “I see the history of Los Angeles… Hundreds of thousands of years ago, animals like whales were swimming in the ocean that was in that exact same area,” she said. “Yes, it’s mind-blowing to think about, but really exciting.”
Builders Uncover Los Angeles’ 10,000-Year-Old Secret In The Subway is an article from: LifeDaily