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The climate scientists and paleoecologists at the La Brea Tar Pits told me that what we’re experiencing right now is part of a long-term trend. The issue of drought, rising temperatures and fire — it’s not the first time that Southern California has experienced this. In fact, about 13,000 years ago, this landscape also experienced those three elements together. And that may have been the cause for the great extinction of the ice age mammals: mastodons, mammoths, dire wolves, saber-toothed cats. They all died in that period, and scientists for decades have been trying to figure out why.
