Smilodon, You're on Candid Fossil!

(Tar balls and a sack lunch, two bits!)
Born in LA, I took the La Brea Tar Pits for granted. I thought every city had a lake of tar that swallowed monsters whole that dates back to the ice age.

La Brea means The Tar in spanish. I suppose the Department of Redundancy Department was responsable for naming the La Brea Tar Pits. Good enough for government work, I suppose. It was probably the same people who named The Los Angeles Angels, which literally means 'The The Angels Angels'. Can we please hand out English/Spanish dictionaries to all Los Angelinos, por favor please?
The Tar Pits were the original ancient fly paper. All the dinos and dire wolves and mammoths got stuck in the tar and died slowly and horribly over several days. Then, the oily content of the tar seeped in to their giant bones and acted as a preservative. Mmm, spread those preserves on toast and BOOM ice age toast. Yummy. Do it, kids.


One amazing monster that was preserved by the the tar tar was called Smilodon, or more awesomely, the saber-tooth cat. Yes, this bag of lion bones with 11 inch canine teeth looks like a dentist's nightmare, but the real nasty part is that unlike modern cats, this guy could open his jaw 120 degrees (a lion can only open 60 degrees).
(Before)


(After)



In layman's terms, that shit is gonn kill you. And not in a fun way. In a bleedy, bloody, punctured jugular way.

(My name is Smilodon, but don't let that trick you
into thinking I'm gonna say cheese.)
My point here is that I hate people who find out I'm from LA, and immediately start rolling their eyes and talking about how lame and show-bizzy it is out west. That always pisses me off. Yes, we have traffic and the Lohans, but we also have the tar pits. We can't be that superficial if we have a lake of stinky, sticky ancient death where we sent school kids on field trips to get tar stuck under their fingernails.

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