La Brea Tar Pits - Early History

Early History

The Portolá expedition, a group of Spanish explorers led by Gaspar de Portolá, made the first written record of the tar pits in 1769. Father Juan Crespí wrote, "While crossing the basin the scouts reported having seen some geysers of tar issuing from the ground like springs; it boils up molten, and the water runs to one side and the tar to the other. The scouts reported that they had come across many of these springs and had seen large swamps of them, enough, they said, to caulk many vessels. We were not so lucky ourselves as to see these tar geysers, much though we wished it; as it was some distance out of the way we were to take, the Governor did not want us to go past them. We christened them Los Volcanes de Brea ."

For some years, tar-covered bones were found on the Rancho La Brea property, but were not initially recognized as fossils, because the ranch itself had lost various animals, including horses, cattle, dogs, and even camels, whose bones closely resemble several of the fossil species.

Union Oil geologist W. W. Orcutt is credited with first recognizing fossilized prehistoric animal bones preserved in pools of asphalt on the Hancock Ranch in 1901. These would be the first of many fossils excavated from the La Brea Tar Pits. In commemoration of Orcutt's initial discovery, paleontologists named the La Brea coyote (Canis orcutti) in W. W. Orcutt's honor.