Although many of the plants and animals found in Ice Age Kern County can still be found in the landscape today, many strange and powerful herbivores and carnivores roamed the flatlands--Imperial Mammoths and American Mastodons, Sabertooth Cats and American Lions, and many other fearful beasts. We know this because they were trapped along with hundreds of species of plants and animals in the gooey asphalt near present-day McKittrick, The McKittrick Tar Pits, posted as California Historical Landmark #498, McKittrick Brea Pit. Sloths and other herbivores became stuck when they came to drink and unknowingly thrust their legs into the leaf-covered asphalt; Dire Wolves, Sabertooths, and similar carnivores became trapped in even larger numbers when they gathered to fight over and feast upon the dying plant eaters. Vultures and other birds of prey then came to feed on the carrion and in turn became mired in the muck, too.
Fossils retrieved from the McKittrick Brea Pits and the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles have provided scientists a remarkably complete picture of life in Kern County at the close of the Ice Age 10,000 years ago. McKittrick fossils can be found in Bakersfield's Kern County Museum, Los Angeles' George C. Page Musuem, and Taft's West Kern Oil Museum. In addition, bones of saber tooth cats, bisons, and mommoths can be found among the pemanent exhibits at the Maturango Museum along with a map of the Pleistocene lakes. The Tehachapi Museum, at the other edge of the county, displays a mammoth femur and the footprint of a Three-Toed Horse.
When global warming brought an end to the continental glaciation about 10,000 years ago, the larger animals succumbed to the trauma and became extinct. A summary of Pleistocene Kern County is provided by the San Joaquin Geological Society in conjunction with the Geology of the McKittrick Tar Pits.
Perhaps the arrival of the first human beings near the end of the Ice Age helped drive the massive beasts to extinction. After all, this new species would have seen the mammoths and sloths as food and the wolves, lions, and saber tooth cats as dangerous threats. Moreover, these bipedal immigrants from Asia had a potent technology--fire--with the potential to ravage the landscape, destroying the animal's homes, food supplies, and mating grounds. In any event the coming of humans ushered in a new phase of Kern County history, and the Kern County Virtual History Tour continues with Indian Kern County.