La Brea Tar Pits and Museum

The La Brea Tar Pits and Museum occupies Hancock Park at 5801 Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile district of Los Angeles, California. It protects one of the richest Ice Age fossil sites in the world, where natural asphalt has seeped to the surface for tens of thousands of years, trapping animals that ventured in. The park grounds are free to walk, and the museum charges admission of about 18 dollars for adults, 14 dollars for seniors and students and 7 dollars for children. Outdoors, visitors see the bubbling asphalt pools, including Lake Pit with its life-size mammoth sculptures, and Pit 91, an active excavation where scientists and volunteers dig and are visible to the public in season. Inside the museum, exhibits display fossils of Columbian mammoths, saber-toothed cats, dire wolves and giant ground sloths, many recovered from the tar. The Fossil Lab window lets visitors watch paleontologists clean and catalog bones, and a short film and a skeleton wall of dire wolf skulls illustrate the scale of the deposit. Most visitors spend two to three hours, with the park alone taking about an hour. The site is most crowded on weekends and school holidays, and mornings on weekdays are quietest. The smell of asphalt is noticeable near the pools. The site sits beside LACMA, and the two can be combined into a single outing. Metro Line 20 and 720 buses run along Wilshire Boulevard, and paid parking is available nearby.