Last day in L.A. was on Friday.  On the agenda: the La Brea Tar Pits and museum.  The museum is full of model skeletons of animals that have been found in the tar pits – mastodons, dire wolves, eagles, camels and more.  Smilodon is my favourite scientific name, I think.  It conveys so much, in so much the wrong way.  Not really the cheery animal its name would suggest.

As someone whose childhood dream was to become a palaeontologist, I could have stayed plastered to the ‘fish bowl’ for hours.  A huge observation window overlooked the workroom in which several people scraped, brushed and otherwise extracted fossils from large lumps of earth.  Arlo just wanted to get back to the mastodon skeleton, of course.