The early 1914 excavation of Rancho La Brea

		Foot Note! During the 1913-1915 excavations, workers earned the reasonable salary of $3.50 a day, but by modern standards, the working conditions were quite dangerous. Shoring (boards inserted to prevent collapse of the quarry walls) was quite primitive, cave-ins were common, and the warm kerosene used to clean the bones was highly flammable.

Chester Stock at his desk while at University of California, Berkeley. Next to him is the skeleton of a tree sloth. Foot Note! The artist Pat Ortega used many of the original photographs taken during the 1913-1915 excavations to draw the composite illustration that you see. A photograph of Chester Stock from 1915 was used for the illustration on the bottom left.

During the large-scale excavations of 1913 to 1915, a million fossilized bones were unearthed and cleaned from 96 quarries or "pits." After this massive process, much of the scientific research on the newly discovered animals was done by Chester Stock. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Stock eventually became one of the most famous paleontologists in modern history for his research, discoveries, and publications on the fossils of Rancho La Brea.

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