Before you knew what the La Brea tar pits were

[LisaM]

what did you think they were?

I thought for a long time it was a Nascar track. I don't know why I thought that! I thought they had races at "La Brea."

[Khephra]

1. I knew exactly what they were from the first

I was one of those little boys who liked dinosaurs before it was cool to like dinosaurs as a kid.

:-)

[boi1946]

2. Me too, only I'm a girl.... n/t

[Cuban_Liberal]

3. Same here!

Actually, I STILL think dinosaurs are cool.

:)

[jeff30997]

4. I second that.

[DBoon]

9. Too bad there are no dinosaurs in the tar pits

They date from the ice age, so they have found sabre toothed tigers and lots of other very strange critters.

The tar pits came maybe 60 million years too late for dinosaurs, though.

I lived right next to the tar pits. The coolest thing was the tar would start oozing up through cracks in the sidewalk in that neighborhood.

You'd walk past a parking lot, and there would be a stain of tar. You'd walk by a week later, and there would be a much larger stain with lots of sand poured on it to soak it up. Two months later, they would have to put a fence up around what was a parking space, to hold in the encroaching tar.

There is also gas seepage from the undergroung petroleum deposits. In the mid 1980's a Ross Dress for Less store blew up from methane that had accumulated in the basement.

If you saw the movie "Volcano", it got the geography of that neighborhood correct - though in reality it is much more upscale than the film indicated.

[radwriter0555]

13. LOL the "Volcano" writers all think anything south of MELROSE

and east of La Cienega is the 'hood.

And I remember when the Cross Dress for Less blew up, that was COOL!

Nowadays all the local buildings have methane detectors and alarms and stuff.

It's really one of the coolest places in los angeles.

[MisterP]

14. heck, my family (sans dad) got lost in East L.A.; Euclid!

the producers'd have a seizure!

[DBoon]

19. Yeah, I lived in that neighborhood at the time

and never realized it was "the hood"!!

Better than "Speed", that showed Vermont Ave ending up in Beverly Hills (of course the whole premise of rush hour freeway traffic going over 55 mph is ridiculous)

[Khephra]

15. Yeah, well...

You knew what I meant....

Loved those sabre tigers as well as the big lizards. Ice age creatures are as facinating as the dinosaurs. I guess they just both get lumped together in my mind.

;-)

[Khephra]

5. They'll always be cool in my book!

I wish I had the memory I had as a kid. I used to just absorb all the latin dinosaur names just like (snap!) that.

[Lone_Star_Dem]

6. I was just a little girl when my mother took me to La Brea.

It started quite a passion for dinosaurs.

[RoeBear]

12. Of course you know that...

...the tar pits don't have dinosaur bones, right?

The pits contain the bones of animals from 40,000 years ago to present.
http://www.tarpits.org/info/faq/faqfossil.html

[Lone_Star_Dem]

20. Didn't mean to imply that there were.

I think it was a plastic Mammoth that I brought home as a souvenir that day. The woman I listened to there is what prompted my interest in paleontology as a child. Later in my childhood, I moved on to peat bogs and mummies. I was always odd.

[Beaverhausen]

7. The Tar Pits ROCK!

But I wasn't sure what they were either. I visited them within a week of moving here. Way more interesting than I thought it would be.

[ronnykmarshall]

10. I dig the pits!

I like watching that stuff all bubble up!

[LisaM]

8. Sounds as if you are all from California

I grew up in Michigan - you know, the car culture.

[DBoon]

11. Here we have "tar culture" instead of "car culture"

:)

[Liberty Belle]

16. I used to work across the street.

Great neighborhood in Beverly Hills, but the view was the pits!

[baba]

17. When I heard about them as a kid...

I had no idea they were in the middle of L.A. I expected that they were out in the desert somewhere. So funny that they are right there, in the middle of a huge city!

[bettyellen]

18. Conversely, we had an oil dump in an empty lot down the street when

I was a kid, and I had read about the tar pits- so i thought i t was one. Till I realized it was the auto body shop dumping in a vacant lot!.
Well, there could have been dinos in the Bronx at some point!