updates of the past week

Well, I worked 4 days in a row and that's why I haven't posted in awhile. Anyways, Friday morning I went to breakfast with Kraig and his coworkers. I have been wanting to go to Dennys and that's where they were going before work, so I got up at 0430 and went with them! I thought they would make fun of Kraig for sure- but they didn't which is good, and I got some Dennys breakfast which is also good! Later that day, I volunteered at the Marine Mammal Rescue Center in San Pedro, CA. They take rescued seals and sea lions which are sick or stranded and help them to get healthy again and re-release them back into the wild... more about this later...

Today, Kraig and I went to the Page Museum and the La Brea Tarpits in downtown LA. It was in the movie Volcano with Tommy Lee Jones where a volcano explodes and destroys LA.. the people out here have not heard of it! Denial, I think. Well, the tarpits are really cool. They are actullay not tar at all. They were formed because there is a lake of oil under the earth's crust and the oil seeps up through fissures. As it comes up it combines with dirt and creates asphalt. The place smells like a constructon site! Well, stuff used to get stuck in the "asphalt" and die- then it got fossilized. The fossils are from the Ice Age. Once one animal got caught int he tar, other animals would come to eat it, and then they would get stuck too. So there are skeletons upon skeletons in the layers of "tar." Every summer, paleontologists excavate one of the tar pits, and every summer they find around 2,500 fossils, some are big like saber tooth cats and mastadons, and they also find new species of bacteria! They have found over 650 species since 1913 and if you see a skeleton of a wooly mammoth in a museum somewhere- this is probably where it came from. Every layer of the asphalt is laced with tons of bones and fossils all mixed up together. As you go down deeper through the layers you go back in time. It was all really cool. Here are some pictures: first, is oil sitting on top of the water, then kraig with a short-faced bear, and then methae bubbling up from below, the bubbles actually looked green. We had a good time! Maybe I should become an archaelogist or paleontologist!