La Brea Tar Pits and Museum
Museum · Mid-Wilshire
5801 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036
Highlights
See Ice Age fossils & active digs at this LA landmark
See Ice Age fossils & active digs at this LA landmark
"Over one million Ice Age fossils have been unearthed in the heart of Miracle Mile. The museum offers a variety of exhibits for a family-friendly admission price. In the fossil lab, watch paleontologists clean and catalogue findings. Outside, check out Pit 91, which is still being excavated. The free park area offers shady lunchtime seating, and the lake of bubbling asphalt, with life-sized models of a trapped Columbian mammoth and American mastodon, is food for thought." - Huge
"The tar pits themselves are viewable for free and expose bubbling natural asphalt, while the La Brea Tar Pits Museum (admission required) displays spectacular fossil composites — Columbian mammoths, ground sloths, dire wolves, North American camels, the famous saber-toothed cat — and houses over a million Ice Age fossils recovered from the site." - Maxwell Williams
"Famous outdoor "bubbling tar ponds" that serve as a window into Ice Age Los Angeles and its megafauna; Conrad Metz calls them "a little window into the times of sabertooth tigers and mammoths." The site emphasizes family-friendly programming on excavations, extinct wildlife, and climate change." - Travel + Leisure Editors
"A natural history museum and active paleontological site with preserved fossils." - Stacey Leasca Stacey Leasca Stacey Leasca is an award-winning journalist and co-founder of Be a Travel Writer, an online course for the next generation of travel journalists. Her photos, videos, and words have appeare
"The La Brea Tar Pits & Museum Not only does this museum give you a peek at local prehistoric flora and fauna long before Hollywood CGI could create them, its deliciously corny and retro exhibits are reason enough to visit. Beginning at the still-oozing and sulphur-stinky tar pits on the grounds outside the building—with fake mastodons caught in the muck and on the solid ground beside it—the mood is old-school museum, but the science is real. Fossil excavation is ongoing and one of the galleries inside has an illuminated wall display of the skulls of hundreds of dire wolves pulled from the tar. (The ever-hungry wolves would be unable to resist the delicious sight of helpless animals stuck in the tar, and would venture in for the kill, only to get trapped themselves). The museum has not abandoned some of its old-fashioned showmanship, including a couple of animatronic displays, one of of saber-toothed tiger mechanically attacking a giant sloth. In a city full of modern sophistication and invention, the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum are able to educate about the city's distant and not-so-distant past."
