Booklet Review: The La Brea Tar Pits as Evidence of a Worldwide Flood

By William Weston
Weston Publications, Anaheim, CA,
2001, 24 pages
Reviewed by Clifford L. Lillo

The author, a creationist, provides a brief history of the area known as the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits, and gives his comments as to the reasons why the animals and birds are located there.

Weston says, "The conventional explanation for the abundance and diversity of this fossil material is that successive animal entrapment episodes had created an ever-growing cluster of bones at the bottom of the tar pools." An unwary herbivore would step up to the water, to get a drink and become ensnared by the tar. Its distress cries would draw carnivores who would become mired in the tar.

He continues, "The superior grade of preservation that characterized the individual specimens stood in stark contrast to the ravaged appearance of the fossil material as a whole. A majority of the bones were damaged in some way: sharp-edged broken ends, impact depressions, deep grooves, and/or heavy abrasions...In addition, the bones were in an entangled mass, closely pressed together, and interlocked in all possible ways."

In contrast to the facts of how the bones looked, evolutionists have described the site as a "death trap of the ages." But, was it?

Weston says, "This chaotic intermingling of damaged and broken fossils seemed to indicate that some monstrous catastrophe had overtaken these creatures of the remote past. Of course, this interpretation was unacceptable to scientists dedicated to the uniformitarian philosophy. What was needed was a paradigm that could fit these fossils within the realm of mainstream science, even if it had to ignore or explain away the numerous clues that indicated otherwise. It was under these circumstances that the animal entrapment theory was born."

Those of us who have visited the La Brea Tar Pits know that the evolutionist "story" is the one presented. Weston gives us some data to use in questioning the guide at the Tar Pits. We can ask: Why is it that time is a "numerical preponderance of carnivores?" (The wolf, tiger, and coyote outnumber the bison, horse, camel, etc.) The normal ratio is typically 100 to 150 herbivores for every carnivore but bones recovered from the La Brea Tar Pits show that "carnivores outnumbered herbivores by a ratio of at least seven to one."