MAMMOTHS: GIANTS OF THE ICE AGE at the Australian Museum, Sydney

Mammoths: Giants of the Ice Age at the Australian Museum, Sydney

I never expected to see mammoths wooly or otherwise in Australia, a continent where mammoths never lived. But on my recent trip to Sydney I had the opportunity to see a wonderful exhibit called Mammoths: Giants of the Ice Age at the Australian Museum, which featured not only mammoths, but mastodons, other Ice Age animals, and information about early humans who hunted and interacted with these animals.. The exhibit will remain on view until May 13, 2018.

Lyuba, which means "Love" in Russian is the most complete mammoth specimen ever found. Contents of her stomach included milk, pollen, pond algae and mammoth dung

My favorite part of the exhibit focused on Lyuba, an intact 42,000-year-old baby wooly mammoth found in Siberia, whose body had been buried in mud and almost completely preserved, down to her fur and the contents of her stomach.

A thick fur coat would have kept baby Lyuba warm

A life-size mural of Lyuba included a present-day muskox  pelt providing the opportunity to feel what mammoth hair may have been like.

Mammoth skeleton. Mammoth tusks could grow as long as 16 feet and weigh more than 350 pounds.

During the Ice Age, mammoths and mastodons roamed the northern regions of Europe, Asia and North America. The Imperial or Columbian mammoths found in North America were the largest of all.

Model.  Mammoth bone huts like this one were constructed about 15,000 years ago at Mezhirich in Ukraine.

In parts of eastern Europe people used mammoth bones and tusks as building material. In the exhibit, a model of one of these mammoth bone houses, along with tiny figures, functioned as a kind of Ice Age doll house.

The Hyde Park Mastodon

Among the many mammoth and mastodon remains found in North America is the Hyde Park mastodon, discovered in 2000 near the town of Hyde Park, New York. The bones were used to make casts for an assembled skeleton on display in the museum exhibit. I was also interested to learn that Thomas Jefferson had a collection of mammoth bones, collected for him by William Clark in 1807 from Big Lick, Kentucky.

The remains of Ice Age mammoths and hundreds of other animals can be seen not far from where I live in Los Angeles at the George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries and have long fascinated me. They inspired my book When Mammoths Walked the Earth which focuses on worldwide mammoth discoveries. But I had never seen the preserved body of a baby mammoth until I went to Australia.
If you are heading to Australia before May 18th, a visit to Mammoths: Giants of the Ice Age is well worth your time.

BERGAMO, ITALY: Pterosaurs and Mammoths at the Museum of Natural Science

Capella Colleoni, Citta Alta, Bergamo, Italy

Hundreds of millions of years ago, during the Dinosaur Age, winged reptiles called pterosaurs ruled the skies. Soaring on long, skin-covered wings, they scooped up fish from lakes and rivers and snatched insects from the air with their long, toothy snouts.  One of the oldest known pterosaurs is Eudimorphodon, whose fossil bones were found in northern Italy in 1973 near the town of Bergamo. In late February 2003, I was in Torino, Italy, with my husband Art, who was there for a conference.

The Eudimorphodon fossils are about 215 years old.

At the time, I was researching my book about pterosaurs, and since we were not far from Bergamo, we decided to go there for a few days after the meeting so I could visit the museum where the Eudimorphodon fossils were displayed.

Walk to our hotel in Bergamo's Citta Alta

Bergamo is nestled at the foot of the Alps and has a long history, dating back to medieval times. The city has two parts. The ancient hilltop Upper Town (Città Alta) is a tangle of tiny medieval streets. It looks over the more modern  Lower Town (Città Bassa) and the hills beyond. A funicular connects the two. We stayed in the Upper Town both because it was close to the museum and because of its historic atmosphere.

Model of wooly mammoth in the lobby of the Bergamo Natural History Museum.

After checking into our hotel, we headed for the Natural History Museum where a model of a wooly mammoth greeted us in the lobby.  The inner rooms had display cabinets with a variety of prehistoric fossils and a huge diorama showing what life might have been like when Eudimorphodon was alive.

Model of Eudimorphodon

Eudimorphodon had a wingspan of about 39 inches and an unusual arrangement of teeth in its jaws.  At the front were several large fangs, and along the sides were rows of smaller teeth, with two more fangs in the middle.  Such teeth would have been good for catching and holding fish.  Skeletons have been found with fossils of scales in the area of the stomach, indicating that fish were part of this pterosaur’s diet. Like the dinosaurs, all pterosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago.

View of Alps from Valcomonica

On our next day in Bergamo we did a driving tour of the lakes region, visiting Valcomonica, where thousands of prehistoric petroglyphs had been carved on the rocks.
Since the Citta Alta  is a tourist destination it had a number of good restaurants within walking distance from our hotel.  Our last evening there I ordered rabbit salad, a meal that I have since tried to replicate but it has never been quite as delicious as it was that night.

Read more about Bergamo at: http://www.lonelyplanet.com/italy/lombardy-and-the-lakes/bergamo#ixzz2t4KCs43F

The La Brea Tar Pits: A Treasure Trove of Ice Age Fossils in Los Angeles

The George C. Page Museum, which houses the Ice Age fossils found in the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits, sits in the heart of the busy city of Los Angeles.  The sticky tar found in the area around the museum not only trapped unwary animals 40,000 years ago but preserved their bones after they died, providing us with one of the world’s  richest sources of information about life in the Ice Age.  Recently, when a parking garage was being excavated for the adjacent County Art Museum, a spectacular new cache of fossils was discovered, which included the remains of dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, horses, bison, and ground sloths, as well as hundreds of smaller animals and plants.  Most rare of all was a well-preserved male Columbian mammoth fossil, nearly complete, with 10-foot long tusks. He has been nicknamed Zed. Scientists estimate that this new find could double the collection of fossils by three to four million specimens.

The remains of over 420 different kinds of animals are among the Rancho La Brea discoveries. 

The tar pits and Page Museum are my favorite places to take visitors to Los Angeles.  Nowhere else on Earth is there a place like it.  In geologic time, 10,000 years ago is quite recent.  It is not hard to imagine that if we were living in California back then (and there were Native Americans living in the Los Angeles basin at that time) that we could have had mammoths in our back yards. The fact that the tar has preserved the remains of so many of the animals that lived in California during the Ice Age, and which are now extinct, makes the La Brea discoveries unique.

The museum is very kid-friendly, with numerous hands-on exhibits.  You can touch a fossil bone, try to pull a rod out of sticky tar, or listen to the roar of an animated wooly mammoth.

The Rancho La Brea Tar Pits are on land that once belonged to Captain G. Allen Hancock, who operated oil wells there.  Today, the oil wells are gone, and the land is a county park named after Captain Hancock.  In the park are both the tar pits, including pit 91, which is still being excavated, and the George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries.  Several models of Ice Age animals including giant ground sloths and a short-faced bear are also located in the park. 

In the lake outside the museum, models of a mother and baby mammoth appear to be sinking into the tar, just as real mammoths met their deaths in the past.

Most fossils found at Rancho La Brea are used for scientific research, but inside the museum are representative examples of all the larger animals, providing visitors with an appreciation of the enormous variety of life that roamed the Los Angeles basin 10,000 to 40,000 years ago.  Many of the bones excavated from the tar pits are of predators–dire wolves, sabertooth cats, American lions (yes, North America did once have lions), and short-faced bears.  One of my favorite exhibits is a frieze of dire wolf skulls. The wolves hunted in packs.  When their prey became stuck in tar and they jumped on to attack it, the wolves often became victims of the tar as well.

The remains of more than 1600 dire wolves, more than those of any other single animal, have been found. 

I always take visitors to watch the short movie that introduces the museum and gives an overview of the Ice Age and tar pit discoveries.  You can also look through a window into the lab and see people cleaning and sorting fossils.  Some of the most important finds are the micro-fossils, small bits of plants, seeds, bones, and other remains that provide clues to the overall environment.

Details:
The Page Museum is open 9:30 to 5:00 pm every day of the year except July 4, Thanksgiving Day, December 25 and January 1.  For information about tickets, parking, directions, and everything you need to know to plan a visit, go the the Page Museum website plan-your-trip page.