Scientific potential of the Binagadi Fossil Cemetery...

Southern California, where I live, is home to one of the world’s richest Ice Age fossil sites. Rancho La Brea (the tar ranch) stays among those that prove this fact. It was about 18 square kilometers in area and was named after the asphalt seeps along its southern margin.

The first scientific paper describing fossils from the asphalt seeps was published in 1875. In 1924, the Hancock family who owned the land donated ten hectares of asphalt seeps to the County of Los Angeles. Originally housed in the Los Angeles County Museum, the fossils from the asphalt seeps were later transferred to the Page Museum that was built at the site of the La Brea in 1977 to house the fossils from the asphalt seeps.  

The Page Museum is located 11 kilometers west of the Los Angeles city center. Its collections contain an estimated 3.5 million specimens that represent more than 600 species of animals and plants.  All became trapped in the Rancho La Brea asphalt seeps between 11,000 and 50,000 years ago. The reconstructed skeletons and paintings of those creatures show what life was like in Los Angeles during the last Ice Age. The sites of some of the old excavations may be seen in the park surrounding the museum.

During the late Pleistocene, the climate of southern California was cooler and wetter than it is today. Herds of mammoths, bison, horses and camels roamed the sagebrush scrub. Mastodons, ground sloths, tapirs, and peccaries inhabited the riparian woodlands. All were preyed upon by dire wolves, sabertoothed cats, giant jaguars, and huge short-faced bears.

The Rancho La Brea assemblage is unusual in that more than 80% of mammals from the La Brea asphaltic deposits are carnivores and more than 70% of the birds are birds of prey. It seems likely that the asphalt formed a carnivore trap. The asphalt is very sticky and needs only to be a few centimeters deep to immobilize a camel or horse.  Herbivores became trapped in the asphalt and they attracted predators and scavengers that in turn became stuck and perished.

I know of a site similar to La Brea in Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, which is named the Binagadi fossil cemetery. Binagadi is one of the oldest tar pits in the world, dating back to about 190,000 years ago (Late Pleistocene rather than latest Pleistocene). Just as the Rancho La Brea assemblage contains immigrants from Eurasia and South America, the Binagadi fauna contains elements from Africa as well as from Eurasia.

Recovery of the rich treasure trove of fossils has been in three phases. The first started in 1913 when the newly created Los Angeles County Museum was given sole right to excavate in the asphalt seeps for a period of two years. During that interval, museum staff made over 100 individual excavations and recovered about one million bones. The recovered fossils represented 300 species of animals and plants that lived in the region between 11,000 and 50,000 years ago. Most of the skeletons on display in the Page Museum were created from the bones excavated during this phase.

The second phase was from 1969 -2007, when the museum excavated at Pit 91 with the objective of recovering all the fossils and not just the larger bones.  This excavation added a further 350 species of animals and plants to the La Brea biota. Most of the fossil plant, insect, and mollusk species in the Page Museum collections came from this single excavation, which gives us a detailed insight of the fauna and flora present in this region 27,000 years ago. We haven’t finished the excavation of Pit 91 but had to put it on hold for a while because of Project 23.

The third phase, Project 23, started two years ago when 16 new fossil deposits were discovered as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art built a new underground parking structure next to the La Brea Tar Pits. These fossil deposits were removed intact in 23 huge wooden crates —hence the name Project 23. These deposits hold the key to understanding the effect of climate on the Los Angeles region as the Earth cooled down to the last Glacial Maximum, about 20,000 years ago, and then warmed up to the present day.

So far we have excavated five Project 23 boxes with two others still in progress, and have recovered more than 16,000 fossils representing more than 80 species of animals and plants. The number of species and specimens is expected to rise as preparation of the excavated fossils is completed in the lab. Items that we hadn’t encountered in previous excavations include heaps of oak leaves, algal mats, clumps of insects and many seeds and invertebrate shells that have yet to be identified.

Project 23 has also yielded associated skeletons of a mammoth, a giant jaguar, a camel, a long-tailed weasel, a baby mastodon, and several sabertoothed cat kittens. This is very interesting because previously we encountered bones of many different individuals all mixed up together in the asphaltic matrix. The skeletons seen in the Page Museum are composite, created from the bones of several different individuals. Well over a million bones were recovered from the La Brea tar pits but before Project 23 the number of actual skeletons could be counted on the fingers of two hands.

The deposits of project 23 have given us further insight into how these asphaltic deposits formed. Based on the previous excavations, we knew that the sticky asphalt seeped to the surface from the oilfield below, that animals became trapped on the asphalt like flies on flypaper, and that over time these built up into big inverted cone-shaped masses filled with bones and other fossils.  But the deposits of Project 23 aren’t the typical asphalt deposits we’ve encountered in the past.  They include thin tabular deposits, pipes or chimneys of fossils and narrow fissure deposits with hundreds of bones crammed into a relatively small space.  How these deposits formed is going to be a focus of research over the course of the next year or so.

The asphalt from these seeps was used by native Americans as an adhesive and waterproofing agent and by early European settlers for fuel and for the roofs of their houses. Undoubtedly people destroyed countless fossils as, unaware of their scientific significance, they dug out the tar.

As in Binagadi, most of the 18 square kilometers of the original Rancho La Brea farmland are now covered with shops, offices and houses and form part of the communities of Hollywood, and Beverly Hills. Of the original Rancho La Brea, only the 10 hectares of parkland still remain. And in Binagadi, it is 1,5 hectares that are preserved today as a natural scientific treasure. But La Brea differs from its counterpart in Azerbaijan with its nice view of a unique park. There is a constant stream of local, national, and international visitors to the La Brea Tar Pits located in the yard of the Page Museum and more than 400,000 people visit the museum annually.

Future collaboration between the scientists based in Los Angeles and those in Azerbaijan is to be of a great significance. After the recent article about Binagadi in the popular Natural History Magazine of the USA, already we in Los Angeles have learned about methods used to clean the Binagadi fossils that we hadn’t tried on those from La Brea. I’m sure we have much to learn from each other. And it would be fascinating to investigate the similarities and differences of the ways that fossils were preserved at Binagadi and La Brea, and what these can tell us about Ice Age life in very different parts of the world.

By the way, the Natural History article written by me and Said Huseynov, the press secretary at the Geology Institute of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (GI/ANAS), introduced Binagadi to a huge international audience, many of which already knew about the La Brea Tar Pits but hadn’t realized that asphaltic fossil deposits also occur elsewhere. It certainly opened my own eyes as to the scientific potential of this relatively unknown resource.

I believe that, Binagadi also deserves to receive the international attention and it would be wonderful to develop it as a museum park. In the article, it was mentioned that, Paleontologist Akif A. Ali-Zadeh, the Director of the Geology Institute and a vice president of ANAS, is eager for paleontologists from the United States to lend their expertise to the further study of the Binagadi site. I am personally very pleased by this invitation. I hope, in the near future, US scientists and researchers of H. Zardabi Natural History Museum of the Geology Institute will be able to start collaborative work at Binagadi and to share experience between the people working with the Binagadi and Rancho La Brea fossils. And I also hope Binagadi will become a significant scientific and tourist destination like La Brea.


John M. Harris, Ph.D.,
Paleontologist/Chief Curator,
George C. Page Museum


/Today.Az/