Bison at La Brea Tar Pits

Of course, Bison antiquus needn't have had the same breeding season as modern bison - they might have calved in February in Tiajuana, for all we on this board know at this point. I don't really see where the dates are all that odd, and I'll bet that published data exists that clears the phenomenon up.

I plan to be at the Texas Tech library Saturday doing work-related stuff - I'll look for these papers, too.

Grandkids are GREAT! The cutest 15-month-old in this half of the state just came by, smiled, and erased version 1 of this post with a single keystroke. I found the Jefferson & Goldin paper, and it clarifies one important point after discussing the same timing issues we've kicked around here: The 1960 Marcus paper is mostly concerned with the differences in trapping in various pits at La Brea. There were 159 B. antiquus, 1646 dire wolves, and 1029 sabre-toothed cats in inventory in the L.A. collection then.

At least the bison age distribution and some discussion of age error brackets are in the Jefferson/Goldin paper, but, with my usual lack of foresight, I failed to read or copy all of it. The part I have does mention that adult females appear to outnumber adult males by 2.5 to 1 - this is based on analysis of horns, so it doesn't apply to juveniles. It also says, with reference to the ages mentioned on this thread, "Juveniles of intermediate ages are very poorly represented in the assemblage."Quaternary Research is a fairly major journal, I'd think, and should be available at most any state university library. If you can't find it, Christian, I'd be glad to copy the rest and send it to you - you'd just have to email me a fax number or address, or be willing to receive a big image file by email.The full name of the other journal is Contributions in Science - Los Angeles County Museum and I thought I got pretty lucky to find that, with issues for many years, too, at Texas Tech. 'Course, they have a pretty active Quaternary research effort there, with Clovis, Badwater Draw, and Yellowhouse Canyon all within a couple of hours' drive.