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WHY DID WE CHOOSE
THE LA BREA TAR PITS
The La Brea Tar Pits, once a death trap, now a trove of prehistoric treasures.
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The La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California, are home to one of the most stunningly preserved ecosystems of the last ice age, making them an ideal location for our game. Our team specifically selected a well-known and extensively studied fossil site for the ease of our own research and accessibility to literature. With over a hundred years of research behind the La Brea Tar Pits, we can be confident in the accuracy of our depiction.
The La Brea Tar Pits record a time span encompassing the latter half of the aptly named Rancholabrean Age, 50,000 to 11,000 years before the present.​ The recency of La Brea's ecosystem is relevant to us, as the overlap of extinct and living species appeals to the specialties and interests of our team. The intersection of prehistoric and modern animals that audiences are familiar with gives context to the great diversity that was once the baseline for Earth's ecosystems before humans. The evidence of large and iconic prehistoric creatures at La Brea makes this a perfect setting to display the full spectrum of North America's once-abundant megafaunal diversity.
The La Brea Tar Pits ecosystem boasts an impressive assortment of mammals of all sizes, rivaling the biodiversity of the modern African Serengeti ecosystem. This is due to the more temperate climate of the last ice age which allowed for animals from different biogeographic realms to coexist. Neotropical animals like sloths could be found grazing alongside arctic animals such as horses and mammoths.
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Illustration by @themongoosedude (Instagram.com/themongoosedude)
% Large Mammal Population in North America
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100
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0
H. sapiens enter continent
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% survival of species
Log (time) kYA
Martin P. S. (1989). Prehistoric overkill: A global model. In Quaternary extinctions: A prehistoric revolution (ed. P.S. Martin and R.G. Klein). Tucson, AZ: Univ. Arizona Press. pp. 354–404.
Ecos: La Brea is set approximately 25,000 years ago during the height of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). This was a time when North American ecosystems were highly productive prior to the extinctions that would follow the end of the Late Pleistocene. Around this time, humans were only just pioneering the continent and had not developed into the widespread megafauna-hunting cultures that would soon develop. While not the only factor in the extinction of large mammals, the spread of humans coincides with the extinction of many large mammals in North America.