THE BONEYARD
How to build a new museum while also saving the land mammals of yesteryear.

Everyone knew that it could happen, but LACMA President Melody Kanschat was beginning to hope that it might not.

“From December 1 until the last week of February,” she says, “things were going boom-boom-boom, and the dirt was coming out, and we weren’t finding anything, and we were just moving.”

And then it happened. Excavators working on Phase I of LACMA’s Transformation encountered a large deposit of fossilized bones mired in subterranean asphalt. Since then several other major deposits have turned up, triggering a high-stakes rescue operation to get the bones out of the ground unharmed without bringing construction work to a halt.

None of this is too surprising, given LACMA’s location in the midst of Hancock Park, the 23-acre remnant of the original Rancho La Brea land grant—a onetime marshland of tar that, over the last century, has proven to be a  paleontological goldmine of such rich variety that it’s given its name to an era known as the Rancholabrean Land Mammal Age.

But neither is it exactly the news that you want to hear if you’re managing an ambitious museum construction project aimed at adding much needed gallery space and other large-scale renovations by 2008.

“We are an art museum,” Kanschat says. “We understand what it is to conserve and protect and study, and we absolutely respect that this is a significant paleontological moment . . . extremely important to our county cousins at the Page Museum. But at the same time we are always looking for solutions to remove these deposits faster and keep our project on schedule.”

In many ways LACMA was ready, if not eager, for the bones. Paleontological monitors have been on site throughout the process. Dr. John Harris, chief curator of the neighboring Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits and head of vertebrate studies at the Natural History Museum, is advising, and Jane Pisano, Natural History Museum president, has been encouraging and helpful as well. And LACMA has hired a Venice consulting firm, ArchaeoPaleo Resource Management, to oversee the salvage and removal of the fossils to offsite facilities where they will be separated, identified, and dated.

The method being used is new and, observers report, something to see. Instead of removing the fossils incrementally, crews identify a deposit in its entirety, isolate it by digging carefully around it, encase it in a wooden box, and lift it onto a truck—dirt, tar, fossils, box, and all. The largest of these parcels weighed 123,000 pounds; a special crane was required to lift it.

Among the fossil remains identified so far are those of mammoths, sabertoothed cats, dire wolves, mountain lions, camels, horses, bison, sloths, snails, millipedes, trees, and oak leaves. And these relics are of more than historical interest, Dr. Harris says.

Given an extensive and carefully preserved sample, he argues, researchers can reconstruct not only individual animals but what happens to an environment undergoing rapid change—namely, the global warming that characterized Rancho La Brea at the end of the Ice Age. And that knowledge, as he points out, could come in handy.

As for President Kanschat of LACMA, she is keeping her sense of humor about bones and deadlines. “We have been working very closely with the Page Museum,” she told a LACMA staff meeting in April. “I mean, what happens if they unearth a big stash of paintings some time?”