Wondering About God At The La Brea Tar Pits

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Wondering About God At The La Brea Tar Pits

...Continued from yesterday:
     I'd of course heard of the La Brea Tar Pits, the famous ponds that are in fact not filled with tar, but with asphalt, formed millions of years ago and which have yielded a treasure trove of ancient animal fossils.
    I also knew that the La Brea Tar Pits were somewhere around Los Angeles. 
    Turned out the Tar Pits were in the back yard of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

     So after lunch at the museum cafe,

...where the food was surprisingly good,

...we walked out to the backyard of the museum,

   

...to the La Brea Tar Pits.

     It was here that we learned that the pits are not actually filled with tar, but with asphalt - which is essentially crude oil - that  was forced up from an oil field located 1,000 feet below this part of Los Angeles.

      We also learned that these asphalt pools were death traps for animals of the Pleistocene era who, thinking they were pools of water, were lured onto their sticky surface:

     At one end of the biggest tar pit were statues of elephants enacting the plight of a female mastodon trapped in the asphalt while her mate and calf look on helplessly.

     Thus the La Brea Tar pits are a 2 million-year-old bone yard from which paleontologists continue to dig up fossils which are pieces to the puzzle of how life on the planet has evolved over time.
     And yet seeing the graphic scenes and images of the terrible, drawn-out deaths that those animals suffered in the tar pits made wonder why God created these sticky, gooey death traps for His/Her animals, and why God allowed those animals to suffer so?  Surely there are enough fossil repositories around the world that these tar pits weren't absolutely necessary for the enlightenment of humankind? Why, then, was the animals' suffering necessary? After all, animals are not like humans, who for the most part create each other's suffering.
       I do sometimes wonder what God is thinking.
      What was God thinking when He/She created oil and allowed it to bubble up to the surface to entrap animals?
        Not to mention, 2 million years later, humans?