At www.sciencenews.org/article/la-brea-tar-pits-yield-exquisite-ice-age-bees … the image below (at the same link) is of the pupae of a bee (comparing a real life version with the fossilised one). The species still lives in the modern world – but the fossil pupae dates from 35,000 to 40,000 years ago. The presence of bees in the tar pit suggests nearby woodland and river
banks with pollen rich wild flowers or blossom in a fairly cool and moiste climate.
At http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/10/the-la-brea-tar-pits-gets-themselv… … is a reference to an article on the La Brea tar pits – but coming from a different angle. What impresses the catastrophist is the rapidity of the event – bees still in their pupae and clearly not flying around as they had not yet hatched, somehow getting glued in all that sticky oily tar. How did they manage to do that? On the other hand, the authors of the paper cited by Anthony are at pains to involve climate change in understanding the bigger animals that got trapped in the tar pits – suggesting a warmer world led to smaller animals and the prey species in turn adapted by becoming slimmer and more gracile, in order to account for differences in size between Pleistocene animals and those that thrive in the Holocene. Some of the comments are quite funny – others less so. The key here is that different tar pits at La Brea are said to date from different times – watch the scientist concerned outlining his views at www.youtube.com/watch?vjK_DKSNbgR4&feature=youtu.be … which is largely the mainstream interpretation of the tar pits with the add-on about climate change (which funded the research, presumably). One thing caught my eye, the claim that all the big Pleistocene animals disappeared when humans turned up, and, we are working on this. I bet. The idea that catastrophism may have been to blame – at 30,000/40,000 years ago, at the end of the Ice Age 18,000 years ago, or at the onset of the Younger Dryas 13,000 years ago, is not broached – but human miscreants are.