La Brea Tar Pits & Museum

Located in the heart of metropolitan Los Angeles, the La Brea Tar Pits are one of the world’s most famous fossil localities. The newly named La Brea Tar Pits Museum (located in the George C. Page Museum building) displays Ice Age fossils — including saber-toothed cats, dire wolves and mammoths — from 10,000 to 40,000-year-old asphalt deposits. But visitors can also watch the processes of paleontology unfold. Every day inside the glass-enclosed Fossil Lab, scientists and volunteers prepare fossils including “Zed,” a recently discovered male Columbian mammoth.

The La Brea Tar Pits and Museum is currently excavating and studying a cache of recently unearthed fossils known as Project 23, an endeavor that could double the Museum’s already tremendous collection of more than three million Ice Age specimens and inform decades of new research. Outside the Museum, in Hancock Park, the Pleistocene Garden and iconic life-size replicas of extinct mammals depict the life that once grew, and roamed, in the Los Angeles Basin.

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