8 Prehistoric Animals Found Perfectly Preserved in Tar, Not Ice

Under a parking lot in Los Angeles, workers discovered 16 fossil deposits — including a nearly complete mammoth that had been sitting in tar for 10,000 years. That’s just one of the eight prehistoric animals in this video that were preserved not in ice, but in sticky black asphalt. You already know about woolly mammoths frozen in Siberia. But tar pits tell a completely different story — and in many ways, a stranger one. The bones come out black, soaked in petroleum, and so well preserved that scientists extracted DNA from them decades before anyone thought that was possible. In this video we cover eight animals pulled from tar pits across Los Angeles, Ecuador, and Venezuela — including a giant predator whose discovery changed what we thought we knew about an entire continent, a cat with a destroyed hip bone that somehow kept living for months, and the most common animal at La Brea whose entire family tree was rewritten by a single DNA study in 2021. The dire wolf was not a wolf. The mammoth at La Brea was not the woolly mammoth. And the tar pits are still active today.