ARCHAEOLOGY: Below the Subway

....the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. Genesis 7:11

"More Ice Age fossils have turned up in a Los Angeles subway tunnel, and there are surprises.
“Trove of Ice-Age Fossils Found in LA Subway Dig” writes Martin Macias Jr for the Courthouse News in Los Angeles on March 4.

A video clip in the local KTLA 5 News begins by calling the La Brea area, with its famous tar pits, as “the largest collection of Ice Age fossils in the entire world.” New fossils were exposed as excavators dug for a new subway line.
They found a
Columbian mammoth (the largest kind),
and fossils of dire wolves,
camels,
horses,
bison,
saber-toothed cats,
giant ground sloths
and many other of the species on display in the Page Museum of fossil discoveries.

Typically, the story was that animals got trapped in sticky tar. Not these, though:

Harris also said it was rare for paleontologists to find fossils of saber-toothed cats and dire wolves at La Cienega station, a site which was not a tar pit, since the beasts didn’t usually live in large communities.

Macias relays a hypothesis about what buried these animals:

John Harris, who leads Cogstone’s laboratory work identifying fossils, said in an interview that partial sloth skeleton was discovered in sediments that contained fragments of charcoal, indicating the beast was preserved in a mudslide that likely resulted from an ancient wildfire.

People driving the busy streets of west Los Angeles, with high-rise buildings all around, are oblivious to the rich community of large animals that once called this land home.

Fitting the La Brea fossils into either an evolutionary or creationary scenario is challenging.

--For creationists, because they need to decide if these are pre-flood, mid-flood or post-flood deposits.

--For evolutionists, because today’s world is impoverished of the magnificent beasts that roamed the world. The biosphere has devolved since then in terms of species richness.

--Noteworthy is the fact that most of the bones are badly disarticulated (separated and jumbled), and some human remains have been found.

--Another surprise is that most of the fossils (both of birds and mammals) are predators. Dire wolves are the most numerous of all! The facts bespeak unusual circumstances in the way these bones were deposited and possibly transported.

Most geologists (both creationary and evolutionary) accept that the sea inundated the Los Angeles basin, which was once apparently a grassland when the megafauna were live. Now fresh-looking fossils of clams, sand dollars (echinoderms) and shark’s teeth can be found throughout Los Angeles county. When these events occurred, and in what sequence, are puzzles still challenging theories.

*If you go to the Page Museum, though, beware the evolutionary tales. Don’t swallow the ending diorama that shows a simplistic, ridiculous panorama of evolution from bacteria to astronaut. Pity the schoolchildren who pass through this museum."

CEH