Re: Dinosaurs from La Brea Tar Pits --??--

[Ben Waggoner <bmw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 29 Nov 1995, Fred Gunther wrote:

> 
> Found the following on the WWW.  The gross level of public paleontology 
> errors has reached a new high (low ??).  Some one at UCB should know 
> better than  to suggest that dinosaur bones come from the La Brea Tar Pits.
> 
> --- copy follows --
> 
> 
> The Sather language gets its name from the Sather Tower (popularly
> known as the Campanile), the best-known landmark of the University of
> California at Berkeley.  A symbol of the city and the University, it
> is the Berkeley equivalent of the Golden Gate bridge.  Erected in
> 1914, the tower is modeled after St. Mark's Campanile in Venice,
> Italy. It is smaller and a bit younger than the Eiffel tower, and
> closer to most Americans -- and lovers of Venice of course.  Yet, at
> 307 feet it houses 50 tons of human, dinosaur and other animal bones
> mostly collected from the La Brea Tar Pits.
> 
   Well, this page isn't on the UC Museum of Paleontology server 
(ucmp1.berkeley.edu), which is a relief; even invert paleontologists
like myself know that there were no non-avian dinos in the La Brea
Tar Pits. The offending WWW page is
     http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~sather/FAQ
and I'll try to contact the page maintainer and get him to fix the
ambiguous wording. Since the page in question is part of the specs for a 
computer language, I hope and assume that relatively few impressionable
schoolchildren have been reading this. . . . 
   I don't find the sentence to be erroneous so much as ambiguously 
written. What I presume the author meant was "human bones, dinosaur bones, 
and other animal bones, including many mammal bones from the La Brea Tar 
Pits," or something like that. . . but then, maybe the author meant the
bird fossils from La Brea, which in an evolutionary sense are perfectly
good dinosaurs.

Ben Waggoner
Occasional Paleontological WWW Guru
Dept. of Integrative Biology
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720 USA
bmw@uclink2.berkeley.edu