The Deeper You Look Into Tar Pit Fossils, The Stranger It Gets

[00:00:00]In 1914, workers in Los Angeles pulled something from the tar that shouldn't have been there. Not a saber-tooth, not a mammoth, but a young woman dead for 10,000 years with a shattered skull and a missing piece of bone that no one has ever found. She's the only human ever recovered from the Labraatar pits. The tar didn't kill her. Over 3.5 million fossils have come out [music] of these pits. 50,000 years of death preserved in asphalt under Los Angeles. And the tar didn't just keep [music] their bones. It kept exactly how they went. These are the strangest, most unsettling things ever pulled from that tar. And I need to warn you, the deeper we go, the worse it gets. Her name isn't really her name, though. Labraa woman is just what researchers started calling her because they had nothing else to go on. No identification, no context, just bones in a cabinet and a hole in the side of her head. And nobody can explain. She was young, somewhere between 17 and 25 when she died. 4 foot8, maybe 4 foot 10.

[00:01:01][music] Small even by the standards of people who lived 10,000 years ago. Her teeth show wear patterns from stone ground meal, which means her people processed grains [music] and seeds. They weren't just hunting and gathering. They had technology, culture, a whole way of life. And then one of them ended up in the tar with her skull cracked open. For decades, the official museum line called her North America's first known murder victim. It made sense. The damage to her skull looks like blunt force trauma.

[00:01:28]Someone hitting her in the head with something heavy. The missing piece of bone has never turned up. If this were a modern crime scene, detectives would be looking for a weapon. But at some point, the language quietly changed. The museum stopped saying murder. Now they say unclassified cause of death, which is the kind of phrase you use when you don't want to commit to anything, but you also can't rule out the worst case scenario. Nobody knows for certain whether another person killed her, whether something fell on her, or whether the skull broke after she died.

[00:01:57]What they do know is that it doesn't look like an accident. And the detail that makes all of this worse is that she was buried deliberately by people who knew her right next to the tar pits that her community was actively using, harvesting asphalt for waterproofing, trading it with people from the valley nearby in exchange for elk antlers.

[00:02:15]Labraa woman lived among tar workers.

[00:02:18]She died near that tar and someone put her in the ground there on purpose. For years, the museum displayed a reconstruction of her. Not her actual skeleton. They used bones from a different person, a Pakistani woman, and modified them for the exhibit. The real skull sat in storage in a file cabinet labeled artifacts pit 10, Labraa woman.

[00:02:37]Eventually, the museum took down even the facial reconstruction reportedly because they were worried about legal claims from the Kumash tribe. So, the only human being ever found in the Labria tarpits is locked in a drawer, possibly murdered, definitely alone. Her story buried deep [music] as she was.

[00:02:54]But she's not the only one whose death tells you something you didn't expect.

[00:02:58]Because right next to her file cabinet in the same museum, there's a pelvis that researchers called the most strikingly pathological object in [music] the entire collection. It belonged to a saber-tooth cat. Now, when you hear saber-tooth cat, you probably picture a solitary killing machine.

[00:03:14]11-in fangs, ambush predator. The kind of animal that exists in your nightmares and nowhere else. And in some ways, that's right. Smileon was roughly the size of a lion, but built heavier, between 350 and 620 lb, with massive front limbs designed for one purpose, grabbing something and not letting go.

[00:03:34]But this particular smileon, it couldn't do any of that. It was born with severe hip dysplasia, a defect that left its hip socket basically destroyed. This wasn't an injury, and it wasn't something that happened in a fight. This cat came into the world broken, and the problem only got worse as it grew. A predator with hips that don't work cannot hunt, cannot run down prey, and cannot defend itself from rivals. In the wild, an animal like this should be dead within weeks of trying to survive on its own. But this one lived to old age.

[00:04:04]Researchers at Labraa partnered with orthopedic surgeons at Cedars Sai Hospital to CT scan the pelvis, the same imaging technology they use on human patients. The scans showed decades of chronic bone remodeling. This animal spent years dealing with the condition, which meant something was keeping [music] it alive. Something was bringing it food. And it wasn't just this one cat. The Labraa collection contains more than 2,000 individual Smileodon fossils.

[00:04:31]That number alone tells you something.

[00:04:32]You don't get 2,000 of anything in one place unless they were living together.

[00:04:37]Solitary animals don't stack up like that. The bones back it up. Delayed weaning patterns show extended family care of young. Healed fractures in the lower back. The kind of injuries you get from slamming into large prey over and over required weeks or months of recovery during which the cat couldn't hunt. Other fossils showed healed shoulder trauma, teeth that broke during kills and then kept getting used for years afterwards. These animals were getting hurt constantly and they were surviving those injuries because other smileon were feeding them. Think about what that means. The creature we imagine as a lone apex predator built purely for killing. It was actually a family animal with pride groups that took care of their sick and injured. 11-in fangs, jaws that could open 120°, four limbs strong enough to pin a bison to the ground. And they used all of that to hunt for the family members who couldn't hunt for themselves. The monster killer fed its disabled. That's what the tar preserved. But real quick, before we talk about 4,000 dead wolves, I want to take a moment to talk about today's video sponsor, cupert. It's a free browser extension, and the whole idea is simple. Smarter shoppers use cupert because it finds the best coupons guaranteed. Here's how it works. You're checking out on pretty much any site like Amazon, Sephora, Etsy, it doesn't matter. And Cooper automatically tests every [music] coupon code that exists for that store before you pay. Not one code, but all of them. If it finds one that works, it applies it and you watch the price drop right there on the screen. And if it somehow misses a valid code that existed, there's a max saving guarantee that can straight up get you a cash [music] reward for it. It also does cash back with over 15,000 stores paid out in 3 to 15 days. It's way faster than the 30-day wait most cashback [music] sites make you sit through, and it'll compare prices across other retailers automatically, so you're not overpaying on Amazon for something that's cheaper somewhere else. It's free. It works on Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari. Basically, everything. And if you want to get started today, you can click the link in the description right below this video. Thank you so much to Cubert for sponsoring this video. Now, back to talking about the wolves. But the direwolves, same pattern, worse ending. If you ever visit the Loba Museum, there's a wall you can't miss. 404 skulls mounted in a grid. All of them staring outward. All of them identical, except for the small differences that [music] come from being 400 separate animals who died 400 separate deaths over [music] thousands of years. Those 404 skulls are a fraction of what's actually been found.

[00:07:10]More than 4,000 individual direwolves have been pulled from the tar. 4,000.

[00:07:16]From one spot, no other site on Earth has produced anything close. And the reason is the trap. An herbivore gets stuck in the tar. Maybe it stepped into what looked like [music] a shallow puddle. Maybe it was drinking from water that had asphalt seeping into it. It doesn't matter how, but once the feet sink, the animal starts to struggle. The more it fights, the deeper it goes.

[00:07:36]Within hours, it's exhausted. Within days, it's dead. But here's the thing, it doesn't sink right away. The body sits there on the surface, rotting, smelling like the world's easiest meal.

[00:07:47]And direwolves were pack hunters. They work together. They came when they heard struggling prey. And they came when they smelled [music] blood. So, one wolf approaches the dying herbivore, gets stuck, starts struggling, and another wolf comes to help or maybe to feed, and gets stuck, too. And a third, and a fourth. The pack instincts that made them successful hunters became the exact thing that killed them in groups. The ratio of carnivores to herbivores at Labraa is 9:1. That is insane. In any normal environment, you'd expect far more prey animals than predators. But Labraa wasn't an environment. It was a trap. And the trap used those social instincts as bait. But the bones tell an even darker story than the numbers do. A study in 2023 looked at more than 500 direwolf leg bones from Labraa and found something that shouldn't show up in wild animals. A 2.6 six rate of developmental bone disease where cartilage and bone beneath joint surfaces cracks and falls apart. In modern animals, this almost never happens in the wild. It's tied to inbreeding to gene pools that have gotten too small to populations breeding with relatives because there's no one else left. The same pattern showed up in the saber-tooths. Both apex predators, the two most dominant carnivores in Ice Age Los Angeles, were quietly falling apart from the inside. their joints failing, their gene pool shrinking.

[00:09:08]Generation after generation, the bones getting a little worse, the problems a little more common. Extinction didn't happen all at once. It was already in progress, written in their skeletons long before the final collapse came. And the twist that makes a direwolf story even stranger. They weren't actually wolves. DNA analysis from 2021 proved that dire wolves and greywolves split off from each other about 5.7 million years ago. Their closest living relatives aren't wolves at all. They're African jackals. The resemblance to greywolves is just two different lineages landing on the same body plan because it works for hunting big prey.

[00:09:44]They looked alike. They lived in the same territory, but they couldn't interbreed. When the megapona collapsed, greywolves adapted. Direwolves couldn't.

[00:09:53]Their genetic isolation became a dead end. And the wall of 404 skulls is the record of it. But not every death in La Breaa was a slow genetic collapse or a trap mechanism playing out over thousands of years. Some of them were just bad luck meeting heavy machinery.

[00:10:08]In 2006, construction crews were digging an underground parking garage for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art right next to the tarpits when a bulldozer scooped into something massive. They stopped immediately, but the damage was already [music] done. 6 in of skull gone. What they had hit was a Colombian mammoth. Researchers named him Zed. Zed is the most complete individual mammoth ever found at Lab Brea. 80% of his skeleton was recovered with both 10-ft tusks [music] intact. His skull alone, minus the chunk the bulldozer took, holds enough information to read his entire life yearbyear because tusks grow in layers like tree rings. He was old when he died, somewhere between 40 and 49, ancient by mammoth standards. His teeth were ground down from decades of chewing plants. But his skeleton tells a story of violence that had nothing to do with tar. Multiple broken ribs, healed, but broken. Several vertebrae in his lower back fused together from trauma.

[00:11:04]These are injuries from fighting, specifically from the brutal combat that male mammoths got into during mating season. Picture two animals weighing up to 10 tons each, slamming their bodies and tusks together, fighting for the right to breed. Zed survived all of that. He won his fights. He lived to old age. And then 40,000 years later, a bulldozer took a piece of his head because someone needed parking. The mammoth was enormous. The saber-tooth was terrifying. And the direwolves came in overwhelming numbers. But if you wanted to point to the single most nightmarish thing that ever walked Ice Age North America, it would be Arctus Simus, the giant short-faced bear. 11 feet tall when standing upright, over 2,000 lb with a running speed somewhere between 40 and 45 kmh. which means this thing could chase down almost anything that tried to run. Home ranges stretching over 1,000 square miles and claws bigger than any bear alive today.

[00:11:59]The most complete skeleton ever found from Indiana, not Labraa, shows what happened when this animal got sick.

[00:12:05]Lesions all over bones from something like syphilis, abscesses between the teeth, or a growth distorting the right armbbone. This bear died in agony, rotting from inside with infections spreading through its skeleton while it was still breathing. And the whole time it was strong enough to kill almost anything else in North America. But Labraa fossils shows something else about this nightmare. At this particular location, it was eating vegetables.

[00:12:30]Isotope analysis from Arctus teeth from LaRaa shows a diet closest to the modern spectacled bear which eats leaves, fruit, and occasionally meat. The tooth wear confirms it with heavy use from processing tough plant material, not crushing bone. Why would the biggest land predator on the continent turn vegetarian at Labraa? Competition. This was the most predator-packed environment in the history of life on land with direwolf packs, smileon prides, American lions, cougars, even a bear weighing a literal ton couldn't consistently fight off that many competitors at every carcass. So, the nightmare ate salad because the other nightmares were worse.

[00:13:10]And the worst of those nightmares, Pantherra Atrox, the American lion, the biggest cat that has ever walked the earth. Over 4 feet tall at the shoulder and up to 1,000 lb. With a bite force calculated at roughly 1,800 lb per square in, triple what a modern African lion can do. This animal was so big and so [music] powerful that scientists spent over a century arguing about what it even was. They classified it as a subspecies [music] of African lion, then reclassified it as its own species when the skull analysis proved it was something else entirely. The evidence of what it could do is in [music] the bones of other predators. A greywolf femur from Labraa shows a bite wound so bad that [music] researchers think it might have taken the leg clean off. A wolf, itself, an apex predator, itself capable of killing most things it ran into, got bitten by something that removed a limb.

[00:14:01]The American lion haunted an open grassland going after horses and bison and camels. It was probably solitary or para at most. The fossils at Labraa show up alone or in twos, not in the clusters you'd see from a social species. One cat,000 lb capable of maming wolves with a single bite. [music] And like everything else at Labraa, it vanished roughly 11,000 years ago alongside the mammoths and the saber-tooths and the direwolves. one extinction event wiping [music] out the entire cast of the Ice Age. The tar didn't just record that these animals died. It recorded who they were when they were alive, and none of them were what we thought. But knowing who they were is only half of what the tar preserved. Because the asphalt also kept something else, exactly how they went.

[00:14:46]Not the genetics or the social structures or the family bonds, but the deaths [music] themselves. The slow ones, the visible ones. what it actually looked like when the trap closed and the dying took months instead of minutes.

[00:14:59]That part is harder to listen to. The juvenile bison probably thought it was walking towards water. That's how the trap usually worked. Rain pooling on top of asphalt, dead leaves floating on the surface, everything looking exactly like a shallow pond until the moment your feet started to sink and wouldn't come back up. More than 300 individual bison have been pulled from LaRaa. And the numbers are the part that's hard to look at. The fossils skew heavily towards young animals, juveniles, less experienced, more likely to mistake a tar seat for something safe, more likely to weigh in without understanding what was happening until it was too late. And then the insect damage studies come in, and the whole thing gets worse.

[00:15:40]Researchers looked at chew marks left by beetle larae on the leg and footbones, specifically on the juvenile fossils.

[00:15:47]And what they found tells you exactly how long these animals stayed on the surface before they finally sank. 17 to 20 weeks, 4 to 5 months. Think about that for a second. A young bison stuck [music] in tar up to its ankles, unable to pull free, standing in the California sun while its body slowly gives out. And during those months, because it's months, not days, predators [music] come. Direwolves, saber-tooths, condors circling overhead. They see an easy meal, something that can't run, can't fight back, and they move in to feed.

[00:16:18]And then they get stuck, too. The bones record this chain of death in layers.

[00:16:22]The herbivore at the center, the carnivores around it, and the scavengers around them. Each one drawn in by the one before. Each one dying in the same trap. [music] The whole thing playing out over the course of a season while insects laid eggs in the wounds and larvae chewed marks into the bone. That's what the tar recorded. Not [music] some snapshot of death, but a whole time lapse. Some of the animals in these pits [music] died because the trap got them. Others died because we did. Harland's ground sloth was built like something that [music] shouldn't be killable. It was 6 feet tall, 3,500 lb with massive back legs and claws that could get anything stupid enough to get close. But the strangest thing about this animal wasn't visible from the outside. Hidden under its skin, invisible when the animal was alive, only revealed after the flesh was gone, were thousands [snorts] of tiny bones embedded directly in the hide, forming a flexible mat of armor around the neck and shoulders and back. A predator biting down this thing, well, it would feel its teeth hit bone inside the flesh, not surface armor like a turtle shell. Armor hidden inside the body, waiting for something to make the mistake of attacking. One study put it simply. When mature, Harlland's ground slots had essentially no enemies except humans. The youngest fossil at Lab Brea dates to about [music] 13,890 years ago, right when humans showed up in Southern California. This animal wore bone under its skin for millions of years, completely immune to every predator on the continent. Then we arrived, [music] and it didn't last another thousand years. Whatever we did, either hunting, fire, or reshaping the land, the armor didn't help. The only thing it wasn't designed to survive was [music] humans. The sloth had armor. The next creature had something worse. A way of eating you really don't want to think about too hard. Territoriornis morami had a 12t wingspan and weighed roughly twice as much as a California condor.

[00:18:12][music] When it flew over the ice age landscape, its shadow would have covered the ground like a small plane passing overhead. For a long time, scientists assumed it was a scavenger, a giant vulture that fed on carcasses, something that cleaned up after the real predators did their work.

[00:18:27]But then someone actually looked at the skull. The hooked beak looked like it was built for tearing meat off dead animals. But the skull bones were weirdly flexible, and the gape was wide enough to swallow prey the size of a rabbit hole. This wasn't a bird that picked at corpses. It was a bird that landed on living things and gulped them down while they were still moving.

[00:18:47]Imagine a bird with a 12- foot wingspan dropping out of the sky, pinning something to the ground and swallowing it alive with no tearing, no chewing, just opening its throat and taking the whole thing in one motion. Well, that's what this skull was designed [music] for. More than 100 territorious fossils have been pulled from La Breaa. And the reason for that number is almost darkly funny if you think about it long enough.

[00:19:08]These birds were landing on carcasses stuck in the tar. Their feet got stuck the moment they touched down. They died and their bodies attracted more territorians who landed to investigate, got stuck, died, and attracted even more. It's a trap that fed itself, using giant birds as both the bait and the victim. The tar turned their feeding instincts into a death spiral that ran for thousands of years. The birds were dying in loops, but the camels were dying in a place that used to be home.

[00:19:35]Camelups Hesternus, which is yesterday's camel, stood 7 feet at the shoulder and ran at about 40 mph and was one of more than 40 individuals pulled from La Breaa. But here's what most people never learn about camels. They're not actually from where you think they're from. The dramadaries in the Sahara, the Bactrean camels in Mongolia are immigrants. All of them. The Campbell family started in North America about 44 million years ago, and some of them eventually crossed into Asia over the land bridge. The ones in the desert today are descended from animals that left. The ones that stayed behind went extinct. The camels you picture in the desert are the ones who got out. The ones at Labraa are the ones who didn't. Not every death, though, was about being prey. Some animals died because they were predators and couldn't tell the difference between a stuck turkey and a free one. The golden eagle is the most common bird at Lambrea.

[00:20:26]Hundreds of leg bones from hundreds of individuals, which makes absolutely no sense at first glance. Eagles are hunters, not scavengers. They strike from the air, grab prey, and carry it away. They don't land on dead things and [music] pick at them like vultures do.

[00:20:40]So, why are there so many eagles in the tar? Well, the answer is the second most common bird of the site, the California wild turkey. More than 12,000 turkey fossils have been recovered from LaRaa.

[00:20:52]12,000. [music] This was an extinct species that only lived in Southern California. And for reasons no one fully understands, they chose to nest near the tar pits.

[00:21:01]Juveniles, especially, young birds that didn't know any better, scratching for food too close to the edge, getting their feet stuck [music] while nothing could help them. And the eagles saw opportunity. A turkey that can't move is the [music] easiest meal an eagle will ever find. There's no chase, no struggle, and no risk of getting kicked or clawed. just drop down, grab it, and fly away. Except the turkey is ankled deep in asphalt. And the moment the eagle's talons lock in, it realizes the turkey isn't going anywhere. And neither is the eagle. Now, this happened hundreds of times over tens of thousands of years. Eagles [music] diving on stuck turkeys, turkeys dying slowly in the tar, eagles dying right next to them, and more eagles coming to investigate the growing pile of bodies. The fossil record isn't just bones, but it's a record of the same mistake being made over and over, generation after generation, because instinct doesn't update. It just keeps doing what worked until it doesn't work anymore. The California turkey lived in this region for possibly 11 million years. Humans then arrived, and the turkey didn't make it another thousand. God, humans are so good for the environment, right? So, the turkey was native and went extinct. The horse was native, went extinct, and then came back, but just not the way you would expect. Every wild mustang in America, every horse on every ranch, every calvary mount and racehorse and pony at a county fair, they're all descended from horses that Europeans brought over starting in the 1500s.

[00:22:24]That's the story most people know.

[00:22:26]Spanish concistadors introduced horses to the new world. Native Americans adopted them and the west was transformed. But the tarpits tell a different version. Equis acadentalis the western horse shows up in the fossil record [music] about 500,000 years ago.

[00:22:42]More than 200 individuals have been pulled from blah bra alone making it the second most common herbivore at the site. These were stocky animals that looked more like zebras than modern domestic horses. [music] Then they lived across North America in enormous numbers for half a million years. Then roughly 11,700 years ago they vanished. Every single one. Whatever killed the mammoths and the saber-tooths and the direwolves likely killed the [music] horses, too.

[00:23:07]And then about 8,000 years later, Europeans showed up with horses on their ships, and suddenly the animals were back, like nothing had ever happened.

[00:23:17]The Spanish thought they were introducing something new to the continent, but they were actually bringing horses home. Native American horsemanship wasn't some borrowed European thing. It was people reconnecting with an animal that had lived on this land longer than our entire species had existed. The horses just forgot it was their continent first. And so did we. But there's still something deeper than all of this.

[00:23:41]Because the tower didn't just preserve individual deaths or species dying next to each other or the months it took for bodies to finally sink. It preserved what extinction actually looks like when you pull back far enough to see the whole picture at once. Not one animal or one species, but an entire world collapsing slowly, visibly in real [music] time. And the strangest part is that that recording never stopped. If you've made it this far watching fossils suffer in tar, you might as well like the video and subscribe because obviously you like this type of content and want to see more of it in the future. Back to the video. Of everything trapped in the tar, one creature refused to follow the pattern. The ancestral California condor watched the whole collapse happen. It was there when the mammoths went quiet. It circled over the last saber-tooth prides and fed on the bodies of direwolves that would never hunt again. And when the dust settled and the ice age was over, the condor was still flying. Hundreds of fossils have been pulled from La Breaa, spanning from about 35,000 years ago all the way into the holosene. The youngest ones date to roughly 9,000 [music] years ago, which means this bird outlasted the megapona extinction by thousands of years. Whatever killed everything else didn't touch the condor, at least not right away, which is strange when you think about it.

[00:24:53]Researchers compared bones from before the extinction to bones from after. And the condor just stayed the same. No size reduction, no shape shifts, nothing.

[00:25:03]While the entire ecosystem collapsed around it, the condor showed what scientists call remarkable stability. No change at all. It kept doing exactly what it had always done, and somehow that was enough. What finally killed it, though? Well, nobody knows. The bones don't say. At some point, it faded and the smaller modern California condor took its place, which is the same species that dropped to 27 individuals in 1987 before captive breeding pulled it [music] back from the edge. But the exact moment of replacement and why it happened remains [music] a gap in the record. Some extinctions hit like a bomb. Others just fade until one day you look around and realize an animal is now gone from this world. But the condor isn't the strangest survivor in this story, though. That belongs to something that you can't even see. In 2007, a team from UC Riverside made a discovery that didn't involve bones at all. They were studying soil samples from the tar pits, the actual asphalt itself, when they found something that shouldn't exist.

[00:26:02]Life. Hundreds of species of it living, growing, and reproducing inside the tar.

[00:26:09]They found more than 200 different kinds of bacteria in samples going back roughly 28,000 years. These weren't fossils and they weren't dead. These organisms were actively alive, trapped in an environment that should have killed them [music] tens of thousands of years ago. Think about what asphalt actually is. It's crude oil concentrate.

[00:26:29]No oxygen, no water to speak of, and toxic to basically everything that tries to live in it. every assumption biology makes about what life needs to survive, asphalt violates all of it. That is supposed to be the end of the story.

[00:26:41]It's a dead environment, dead organisms, dead everything. And yet, many of these bacteria belong to [music] entirely new families that had never been described before. Their closest relatives are organisms that survive in radioactive waste, in boiling hot springs, in the kind of places you'd assume nothing could live. But these bacteria didn't just survive in the tar. They adapted to it and evolved inside it. The researchers found that these organisms had developed three completely new types of enzymes. Enzymes capable of breaking down petroleum products. The bacteria weren't just surviving in the tar. They were eating it. You know those bubbles that you see rising to the surface of the tar pits. The ones that make it look like the ground is slowly breathing.

[00:27:23]Well, those aren't geological. That's methane. It's waste product from digestion. [music] The bacteria are breaking down the asphalt from the inside and releasing gas as they do it.

[00:27:33]Their bacteria farts. The archive isn't closed. It's still running. 50,000 years of death preserved in oil. And beneath it, something is alive. Still eating, [music] still adapting, still evolving in an environment that shouldn't support life at all. And Laa isn't even alone.

[00:27:50]We treat the tarpets like some sort of tourist attraction. It's a weird California only thing, something unique to one park in Los Angeles. But asphalt seeps exist all over the world, and they've been running the same trap for millions of years. In 2006, workers in Venezuela were digging a trench for an oil pipeline when they cut into something unexpected. Bones in incredible condition, sitting in freshly turned Earth, they stumbled into El Braille Dior, the largest asphalt deposit on Earth, more than 37,000 m deep, preserving fossils from 2.5 to 3 million years ago. That's older than Labria by a factor of 50. And what they found rewrote entire chapters of what we thought we knew. Among the fossils was a saber-tooth cat, Homothereum Venezuelis.

[00:28:36]Before this discovery, every saber cat in this family had been found in the northern continents, North America, Europe, and Asia. The whole group was supposedly restricted to the top half of the map. Finding one in South America changed everything. An entire lineage of predators had territory no one knew about preserved in Venezuelan asphalt waiting to be found. Alongside the saber cats, gipadons, armored mammals the size of small cars because of course they were giant armadillos ancient to peers.

[00:29:06]And this is the one that got me. A single moler from a capuchin monkey. 3 million years old. The first fossil primate ever found in Venezuela.

[00:29:15]recording the last moments of a monkey that got stuck in tar before humans existed anywhere on Earth. The tar trap doesn't care where it is or when. It just keeps catching, keeps preserving wherever the oil seeps up and something makes the mistake of stepping in. Which brings us to Cuba and the image that stayed with me the longest. In the Matanaz province, there's an asphalt spring that used to bubble up from the ground about 5 m across. It's inactive now because nearby oil drilling drained the source. Researchers excavated it before it went dry and found the usual mix of crocodiles, turtles, rodents, birds, and one ground sloth. But this sloth was different. Most tarpit fossils are jumbled up. Bones pulled apart by scavengers and scattered by water. All of it mixed together with remains from dozens of other animals. The Labria collections are full of mixed up skeletons. A femur from one individual next to a skull from another. Everything stirred together by 15,000 years of death. The Cuban sloth wasn't like that.

[00:30:16]Its armbbones were still connected, still in sequence, still arranged exactly the way they would have been when this animal was alive. The researcher's conclusion was simple. This animal was trapped while living. It sank into the asphalt with its body intact, held in position by the tar as it died, and the asphalt preserved the exact arrangement of its limbs [music] in its final moments. Its arms are still reaching, not curled up, not relaxed, not in any position an animal would settle into after death. Reaching, extending, pulling towards a surface that it will never make it back from.

[00:30:50]That's the image the tar preserved. Not just bones, not just species, [music] not just how ecosystems collapse, but the last struggle of something trying to survive. Frozen in oil, arms outstretched, still reaching [music] after thousands of years. But Tar preserves the slow deaths, the kind that takes months, the kind where you can watch the bone settle into position.

[00:31:11]Amber preserves something else, something that was still moving when it got trapped. Something that you can see midaction, frozen in mid leap [music] or midbite after a 100 million years. Well, that video is on your screen right now because I've already made a video talking about amber fossils, and you should go watch it right now. Make sure to also like this video and subscribe.