Scott Dodge, age 10, of Baldwin, Missouri, for his question:

What are tar pits?

Tar is true dark, tangy smelling stuff they use to pave roads and to add waterproof surfaces to roofs. It also is processed to make glues, cleaning fluids and a long list of plastics. Tar is a very valuable material with many, many useful duties. We get most of our supplies from petroleum. When the crude oil from the ground is processed to extract such things as gasoline, tacky tar is one of the by products.

Some of the tar we use is taken from pits in the ground. There are such natural tar pits in Trinidad and Venezuela, in Utah and Colorado. These beds of tar formed where buried petroleum seeped to the surface. There the lightweight substances such as gasoline evaporated into the air    and the heavy tar stayed behind. The La Brea Tar Pits near Los Angeles are a wondrous tourist attraction. Many prehistoric animals were trapped in its tacky puddles and people come to see their fossil remains.