Something in the news today reminded me of Jenny’s science-vs-sports reporting idea.
I blogged about it on my other blog , because that’s where I originally reported on my Tar Pits trip, but it’s cool enough to mention twice.
In 2007 the LACMA museum started expanding its parking garage. The museum is right next door to the La Brea Tar Pits. (That city block consists of only the Tar Pits park and the museum). This means that the museum is built on the exact same interesting ground that yields all those fossils at the pits, so the museum got all the ground that was excavated. When I visited in August 2008, I saw lots and lots of crates full of parking garage soil that they don’t even have time to go through. I also saw mammoth tusks , still in plaster! And in the fishbowl of the museum I saw more plastered things from underneath the garage.
A mammoth from underneath an L.A. parking garage is incredibly cool and I was very excited about this. But science news reporting is slow, and it wasn’t officially announced until…today .
I am fascinated by the intermediate process I saw, where everything was plastered up. How did they get the tusks out? What did they do in between August and February to go from these white blobs I saw in the fish bowl to the picture in the NYT article . (Is that even the same jaw?) Yes, these are the things you can see in the museum itself, and ask the scientists there – the La Brea Tar Pits Page museum is extremely interactive and open about what is going on – but how can you possibly in good conscience call this “news” anymore?
I saw more plastered things from underneath the garage … they weren’t fossils: they were technicians, still dead drunk from the party the night before.
Yes, well, paleontologists…
Oh, and I saw this news article on my new iPod Touch, after installing the NYT Application, which a coworker recommended to me after she read on Twitter that I have an iPod Touch now.
It’s the most modern way of getting mammoth news! On the time line of things I can imagine, getting news over iPod is one of the most recent, and mammoths are probably one of the oldest things I can wrap my head around without getting overly confused.