La Brea Tar Pits

The smell of asphalt is the first thing you’ll notice at the La Brea Tar Pits, a group of active fossil beds bubbling up in the public green space of Hancock Park. This is the world’s only active, urban Ice Age excavation site, and the scientific work happens right out in the open. You can walk the landscaped paths for free, circling the various seeps that have been trapping animals and plants for the last 50,000 years. The largest of these is the Lake Pit, a dramatic bubbling pool where fiberglass models of a mammoth family depict the kind of scene that played out here for millennia. Beyond the lake, you’ll find active excavation sites like Pit 91 and Project 23, where paleontologists continue to unearth new fossils from the dense asphalt deposits. The finds from these digs end up inside the on-site George C. Page Museum. The building is designed as a single loop that showcases an incredible collection of Ice Age fossils – complete skeletons of Columbian mammoths, mastodons, and giant ground sloths. One wall is covered entirely with hundreds of skulls from dire wolves, all pulled from the surrounding pits. A glass-walled Fossil Lab sits in the center of the museum, and for many, watching the scientists and volunteers clean and prepare recently excavated bones is the main event. It connects the skeletons on display with the live digs happening just outside. The museum itself is compact and can be explored in under two hours. While the outdoor park is always accessible, a ticket is needed for the museum, the 3D movie, and the "Ice Age Encounters" show featuring a life-size saber-toothed cat puppet.