Tar pits on a hilltop about 7 kilometres north of Baku in Azerbaijan, where asphalt has seeped out of the ground for tens of thousands of years and taken animals down with it, exactly as at Rancho La Brea but with almost none of the fame. The tar hides under dust, leaves and water, which is what made it a trap. The bone-bearing ground covers about 1.5 hectares on a hill 54 to 57 metres above sea level, surrounded by salt lakes and an old mud volcano. Vladimir Bogachev ran the excavations through the 1930s until the war stopped them in 1941, and the deposit has been protected by the state as a natural monument of special significance since a government decree in March 1982. The Baku oil country all around it is part of the same geology.
Ice age mammals and birds trapped in natural tar · Late Pleistocene
This ground is protected. Photograph it, record it, leave it where it lies. On US federal land the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act 2009 makes collecting vertebrate fossils an offence, and penalties are real.
Azerbaijan
See it on the map
This is remote ground. The closest other places on the map are a long way off.
