Workers excavating an underground garage on the site of an old May Co. parking structure in Los Angeles’ Hancock Park got more than just a couple hundred new parking spaces. They found the largest known cache of fossils from the last ice age, an assemblage that has flabbergasted paleontologists.

Researchers from the George C. Page Museum at the La Brea tar pits have barely begun extracting the fossils from the sandy, tarry matrix of soil, but they expect the find to double the size of the museum’s collection from the period, already the largest in the world.

Among their finds, to be formally announced today, is the nearly intact skeleton of a Columbian mammoth — named Zed by researchers — a prize discovery because only bits and pieces of mammoths had previously been found in the tar pits.

But researchers are perhaps even more excited about finding smaller fossils of tree trunks, turtles, snails, clams, millipedes, fish, gophers and even mats of oak leaves. In the early 1900s, the first excavators at La Brea threw out similar items in their haste to find prized animal bones, and crucial information about the period was lost.

Information and news regarding this discovery as well as a slew of other archaeology related topics can be found on newsgroups.

Below is a list of newsgroups that are directly related to this field and conversations relating to this story.

alt.archaeology

alt.history.sci.archaeology

fido7.su.archaeology

free.uk.archaeology

free.uk.archaeology.myths

free.uk.aviation.archaeology

msn.forums.science.archaeology

sci.archae

sci.archaeology

sci.archaeology.mesoamerican

sci.archaeology.moderated

z-netz.alt.archaeologie

z-netz.wissenschaft.archaeologie