The LA BREA TAR PITS: A Journey to the Ice Age

Los Angeles is the land of palm trees, movie stars, Malibu and the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

- AUDREY PAVIA

But more surprisingly, the second largest city in the U.S. is home to the La Brea Tar Pits, the site of the largest collection of late Pleistocene asphaltic fossils in the world.

Located right in the middle of downtown L.A., among the freeways and skyscrapers, the La Brea Tar Pits is an active paleontological research site formed around a group of tar pits, where natural asphalt has been seeping up through the ground for tens of thousands of years. Over millennia, Ice Age animals became trapped in the sticky asphalt, which then preserved their bones as fossils.

The Tar Pits were first observed by European explorers in 1769, but were known to the Native peoples of Southern California for generations. The presence of fossils in the bubbling asphalt was not discovered until 1901 by a Union Oil geologist. When the significance of the pits was realized after years of fruitful excavation of fossils, the property's owner, George Allan Hancock, donated the land to the County of Los Angeles so it could be preserved. Excavation of the pits continued on and off through the early 20th century, and in 1977, the George C. Page Museum, which housed many of the pit fossils, was opened to the public. To date, millions of fossils are on display at the museum, which is now called the Page Museum and Tar Pits. Visitors can watch paleontologists work in the lab and get an up-close look at the research being performed.

DEADLY TAR