Review: Page Museum

The Page Museum, also known as the La Brea Tarpits, is located in north-west of LA city proper. This is a medium-sized museum that is dedicated entirely to ice age animals, particularly those found in the California area. You won't find any dinosaurs here, but you will find some amazing creatures, such as dire wolves, mammoths, mastodons, condors, and big cats (to name a few).

Dire Wolf

Mammoth

Giant Sloth

The cool thing about this museum, apart from the focus on ice age animals from the area, is that most of the creatures featured were found on the grounds of the museum. The page is the site of several very active tar pits (which makes walking on the grass a somewhat risky proposition). There is a lot of research going on, and the page makes use of that. They have a 'fishbowl' laboratory where you can watch paleontologists cataloging and restoring fossils, as well as sorting through the matrix (dirt or tar surrounding the primary fossil) for microfossils (bugs, small bits of bone, plant material etc.). During the summer, you might catch a glimpse of some researchers digging up fossils from pit 91. Right now at pit 91, they've stopped digging to work on the fossils they found in the basement of the near by art museum. So you can see the work in action.

Tar pit with fossils

In addition to the fossil displays, there are displays on the research being done, and two short films (one on the history of the museum and the other on the tar pits). There are curiosity carts for a more hands-on experience and two different tours (one for the inside of the museum and the other for the outside).

This is a great museum, a very rare opportunity to see ice age creatures from the very area they used to live. It's a great value too. $7.00 for adults, less for kids and students of all ages. I believe they also do discounted or free admission for members of other museums that are part of the ASTC system.

Photohunter: Dark

Here's one of my favorite sunset pictures, the sun setting over the edge of the Australian outback, framed by a bottle tree. Bottle trees are named after the fact that the trunk looks like a bottle, and that it holds a lot of water. The insides of the trunk are very fibrous instead of being dense like most hardwood trees we know. Having all of these gaps inside of the trunk allows the tree to retain a lot of water, a fact exploited by the settlers and indigenous peoples of the drought stricken Australia.

It can get 18-20 meters in height and 2 meters in width (60 ft high and 6 ft across). It is also called Kurrajong, which is derived from the word 'fishing line' in one of the aboriginal dialects. The fibrous inner part of the bottle tree was often used to make twine products, such as fishing lines.

Here's a picture of a bottle tree in the day time:

Weekend work

This is particularly appropriate for my weekend... For more PhD fun, click link!

Life Photo: Purple-ringed top snail

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Mollusca

Class: Gastropoda

Order: Archaeogastropoda

Family: Trochidae

This is a purple-ringed top snail, Calliostoma annulatum, the most beautiful shelled snail on the west coast in my opinion. They cruise up and down kelp plants looking for a meal. Generally, they eat what ever is growing on the kelp plants, such as hydriods, bryozoans, diatoms, and copepods. If there is nothing on the kelp plant, they will eat the kelp itself. They have been known to travel 20-30 feet in a twenty-four hour period.

Photohunter: clouds

This is a picture of a cloud of sperm. You can see the green anemone which produced these clouds wedged in between the upper rocks. Anemones are broad-cast spawners, which means that they release their eggs and sperm in the water column and hope that they get fertilized. They do try to coordinate their spawning efforts by using external cues, such as temperature. When the water gets warm enough, they release their gametes (eggs or sperm). However, for those living in the shallow tidepools, this can get a little tricky, as the temperature of the tidepool's water is often warmer than the ocean water. So, during the reproductive season, you can sometimes find anemones that were fooled into releasing their gametes early.