La Brea

Back in 2008, Kathryn and I were down in LA visiting her brother and seized the opportunity to check out the La Brea Tar Pits. Because after years in the movie industry, when I think of Hollywood, I think of a terrified and witless brute thrashing itself to death in several meters of steaming waste. The pits themselves are a bit of a shock to find as the city is so built up around them that you simply come to a green area full of puddles and pools of tar. Apparently there is so much tar in the area that its not uncommon for it to start seeping through people's basement foundations.
The on-site museum had an excellent selection of bones for Kathryn to admire and enjoy along with a lab for analysing bone and pollen samples and the like. One of the strangest displays was a rack of dire wolf skulls several times the number shown in the picture below. Being pack hunters with a strong alpha leadership system it was apparently not uncommon for whole packs to get caught in the tar following their top dogs. And with so many large animals in the tar as well its not surprising that wolf packs would get greedy about the chance for so much fresh meat.
Speaking of tar just popping up out of the ground, there were frequent pools at random throughout the grounds. Kathryn and her brother Steven were totally hypnotized by this and spent many happy minutes poking in the tar with sticks and generally making a mess.