La Brea Tar Pits and Museum

What La Brea Tar Pits and Museum makes

Topics paleontology, fossils, ice age, education, museum

TEMPORARILY CLOSED. The Samuel Oschin Global Center for Ice Age Research at La Brea Tar Pits will reopen in 2028. Located in the heart of metropolitan Los Angeles, La Brea Tar Pits is one of the world’s most famous fossil localities. The museum's collection 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 paleontology unfold. Inside the glass-enclosed Fossil Lab, scientists and volunteers prepare fossils, including “Zed,” a recently discovered male Columbian mammoth. La Brea Tar Pits has been excavating and studying a cache of recently unearthed fossils known as Project 23, an endeavor that could double the site'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.

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