A human skull came out of the ground at La Brea. Not out of a grave. Out of asphalt.

It was lifted from the pitch along with Amerindian artefacts, held intact by the same black surface that crews have been cutting away by the tonne for more than a century. The lake that swallowed it covers about one hundred acres and goes down roughly seventy-six metres — two hundred and fifty feet of soft bitumen that closes over anything left standing on it.

Walter Raleigh walked onto that surface in fifteen ninety-five and used the tar to caulk his ships. Four centuries of digging later, nobody has emptied it, because it keeps pushing back up from underneath.

That is one location on an island of four thousand seven hundred and sixty-eight square kilometres. There are stranger ones.

There is a mountain exactly four metres shorter than the tallest peak on the island, and in the water trapped inside plants on its summit lives an animal found nowhere else on Earth. There is a village a volcano buried in nineteen ninety-seven without producing a single drop of lava. And there is a serious argument, made by the people who map tectonic plates for a living, that Trinidad is not a Caribbean island at all.

FIFTY FACTS, COUNTED ONE TO FIFTY

They get harder as the number climbs.

— The Pitch Lake as one of only three natural asphalt lakes on the planet, and what the other two are
— Ocelots, howler monkeys, capuchins: South American animals on what everyone calls a Caribbean island, and why they are there
— The Aripo Savannas, a thousand hectares of near-treeless grassland on a tropical island, and two plants that grow nowhere else
— El Cerro del Aripo and El Tucuche, four metres apart in height and kilometres apart in warm lowland forest
— Ninety-nine mammal species, roughly sixty-five of them bats, thirty-seven frogs, and what that ratio tells you about where the island came from
— The plate boundary running straight through it: the Caribbean plate grinding eastward past the South American plate at about twenty-two millimetres a year
— The mud volcanoes, the Navet Formation shales underneath them, and the eruption at Piparo in nineteen ninety-seven that buried a village with no lava at all
— Number thirty-eight: Phytotriades auratus, the golden tree frog, which lives inside the water trapped in a single species of plant, on two mountaintops, separated by lowland forest a frog like that cannot cross

AND NUMBER TWENTY-FIVE IS A CORRECTION

One of the most repeated claims about Trinidad — the kind half the travel sites on the internet still print — does not survive contact with the source. This video says which one, and shows what the record actually supports instead.

THE ARGUMENT AT THE END

Trinidad sits on the continental shelf of South America. The sea between it and Venezuela is shallow enough that the two were connected for most of recent geological time. The animals are South American. The rocks are South American. The plate boundary runs through the island itself.

So is Trinidad a Caribbean island, or the last piece of South America with a Caribbean passport? Tell me in the comments — this one genuinely splits Trinidadians, and the geologists are not on the side most people expect.

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