Preserved by Tragedy

Tragedy, by nature, destroys, but it may also preserve.

Consider the La Brea Tar Pits, where countless Ice Age creatures met their end. From the late Pleistocene epoch, roughly 10,000 to 50,000 years ago, mammoths, saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, and even tiny insects found themselves trapped in the sticky asphalt seeps. What was once their doom became their legacy—bodies entombed in tar, their bones waiting millennia to tell their story.

There are places in Montana where we find the fossils of dinosaurs that were swept into rivers and buried in mud, only to be preserved for millions of years.

Or look to Pompeii, where an ordinary day in 79 CE ended in disaster. Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying the city and its people in volcanic ash. In the suffocating heat and falling debris, time stood still. Their final moments, frozen in hardened ash, now offer a glimpse into a life abruptly halted but perfectly preserved.

Though lives were taken in tragedy, the victims were held in place—kept for the light of a new day.

Body Casts at Pompei

—Mitchell Hegman