A Visit to the La Brea Tar Pits and Page Museum

For tens of thousands of years natural asphalt has been seeping up from the ground in what is now urban Los Angeles. Around Hancock Park the seepage has been enough to create areas large enough to trap animals who have been unable to escape and have perished, sinking into the asphalt which has soaked into their bones, hardened and encased them ready to be found years and years later. I’m not sure exactly how I heard about the La Brea Tar Pits but it quickly became a must see site when developing our Bucket List for California. I thought it would be a little like Rotorua in New Zealand which is known for its bubbling mud pools, Te Wairoa (the buried village) and a strong smell of sulphur. I was very wrong! In the first week of our Californian adventure we found ourselves looking for parking around the La Brea Tar Pits. We were warned in all the tourist guides that whilst there were car parks behind and across the road from the site, they were very difficult to get. As luck would have it we found one straight away! Travelling in winter has so many positives! Make sure you have some dollar bills on you to pay in the automatic ticket machine as you leave. Walking towards the La Brea Pits was surreal. Immediately my nose was overwhelmed by the smell of the asphalt which is quite similar to the avgas you smell around Airports. We saw a small pool of water with mammoth statues and a path up to the museum which of course, like all great places in America, had a line. It did move quickly, and shortly we were inside the Page Museum where we purchased our tickets. For only US$34.00 we had access to the museum and across the site. The Page Museum and La Brea Tar Pits are an actual research and education facility where excavations and study continues every working day. It boasts one of the most extensive collections of Ice Age fossils and visitors are able get up and close with the actual bones that have been retrieved from the pits. Twentieth Century Fox had inspiration for their Ice Age movies in their own backyard and the kids were quick to point out the real-life (well their bones anyway) of the characters in the film. The museum isn’t particularly big. You move in clockwise directions around an atrium. As such, it isn’t overwhelming for children and they are able to take their time working through each exhibit without fear of missing anything due to time. The scale of the mammoths fascinated the kids. These animals were seriously big! Both Master R and Miss N also spent some time at the tar area where they attempted to pull sticks out of the tar. It was hard work. Inside the Page Museum you will also find the Fossil Lab where you can observe real life palaeontologists at work. You can see them cleaning fossils, sorting them and preparing them for exhibit. Fascinating! Better still, it’s open seven days a week so you’ll never miss observing them at work. If you’re in LA for a little while you can even volunteer to work in the lab. How I wish we could have done that! (You do need to be over 16 and commit to 8 hours a week BUT what an experience!!) So if dinosaurs had been extinct for a long time before La Brea Tar pits came about, what ancient animals did we see? There are over 1 million fossils at the Page Museum from 650 different species. We spotted extinct bison, camels, condors, coyote, dire wolf (yes, they also existed outside the Game of Thrones series!), ground sloth, horse, mammoth and sabre toothed cat just to name a few. The kids quickly made the observation that many were significantly larger than their modern day versions. This made them wonder what had caused the downsize and why they were now extinct. Of course, that question is still being hypothesised by countless scientists around the world! After exploring the Page Museum we headed outside to the La Brea Tar Pits. We explored many of them and were able to see how paleontologists at the tar pits excavate the fossils. We saw the boxes that contain all the deposits from Project 23 (16 new fossil deposits discovered during the creation of an underground car park); Pit 91 which has been excavated for over 40 years and provides an excellent viewing station into the working pit; and the lovely Pleistocene Garden. What an adventure! If you find yourself in Los Angeles you must visit both the Page Museum and the La Brea Tar Pits. It is open 9.30-5.00 pm each day.