Extinct megafauna of the La Brea Tarpits

Paul Curnow
Adelaide Planetarium

Thursday 1st October 2026 at 7.00 pm

Mawson Lecture Theatre, 
Department of Earth Sciences, North Terracce Campus, Adelaide University

The La Brea Tarpits is an active palaeontological research site in urban Los Angeles, California, USA. These tar pits are where natural asphalt (bitumen) has seeped up from the ground for tens of thousands of years. Over many centuries ‘megafauna’ and other smaller animals wandered into the area and were trapped in the tar. This has allowed the remains of countless entombed animals to be preserved and has offered us a unique window into understanding many of the extinct species on the North American continent. In this talk I will take you on a behind-the-scenes tour of the tar pits and introduce you to some of the species that once roamed this area, like sabre toothed cats; ‘Smilodon’, giant ground sloths, dire wolves, and mammoths.  

Paul Curnow is a world-renowned astronomer, and after 33-years is South Australia’s longest serving planetarium lecturer. He has been a member of the Field Geology Club of South Australia since 1992. In 2002 he served as a southern sky specialist for visiting U.S. and British astronomers who were in Australia for the total solar eclipse. After three decades of research, he is regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on Australian Aboriginal night sky knowledge; and in 2004 he worked in conjunction with the Lake Erie Nature and Science Center Planetarium in Ohio on the creation of a show that features Indigenous Australian stories of the night sky. From 2018-2025 he has served as a consultant on Indigenous Astronomy for the Australian Space Agency.

Paul runs several popular courses for the public that focus on the constellations, planetary astronomy, meteoritics, historical astronomy and ethnoastronomy, and which primarily deals with how the night sky is seen by non-western cultures. He appeared as the keynote speaker at the inaugural 2010 Lake Tyrrell Star Party in Sea Lake, Victoria and in 2011 was a special guest speaker at the Carter Observatory in Wellington, New Zealand. Since 2012 Paul has taken the role of Lecturer for the ‘Astronomy the Universe’ course (EDUC2066); and between 2019-2021 for ‘Science’ (EDUC 2030) for the School of Education at the University of South Australia.
Since 2021 he has been a member of the Andy Thomas Space Foundation Education Advisory Committee; and in 2023 completed a U.S. lecture tour, where he was a special invited guest speaker at several planetariums, colleges, and universities. Paul appears regularly in the media and has authored over 50 articles on astronomy.

Refreshments will be served in the tea room following the meeting. 
University policy is to close doors at 7.00 pm, so arrive punctually! The door may be monitored for latecomers until the main lecture starts (around 7.10 to 7.15 pm). 

Please note that the speaker has requested this talk not be zoomed. It will however be recorded for later viewing.



 

TUTORIAL: GEOLOGY OF EARTHQUAKES
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This month’s tutorial is on earthquakes, something we are all aware of with the recent disastrous twin Venezuelan Earthquakes. Earthquakes can do enormous damage in urban areas, such as building collapse, rubble filling the roads, preventing emergency vehicles from accessing areas, gas pipelines rupturing, causing fires, and fallen electrical wiring. An earthquake on the ocean floor can generate a devastating Tsunami. Many lives are lost when an major earthquake hits. Amid all this chaos, there is a pattern and an understood science of earthquakes, which we will explore in this tutorial.

We meet in the Mawson Lecture Theatre and start at 6:40. For those who would like to attend the tutorial, try to arrive before 6:40 and sit more towards the left-hand side of the theatre (as viewed from an audience perspective). 

Peter Briggs