Seventieth Anniversary of Academy Excavations at Rancho La Brea

Abstract

The Southern California Academy of Sciences was one of the early organizations permitted to collect fossil material from the Pleistocene beds at Rancho La Brea in Los Angeles, California. The Academy work began in June, 1909, though the first recognition of the importance of the fossils had come 34 years before. In 1875 William Denton visited Major Henry Hancock at the rancho, collected a few fossil bones and, two years later, published a description of them in the Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History. The article apparently created no appreciable notice and was soon forgotten (Stock, 1956).