The back rooms of the La Brea Tar Pits are, right now, a maze of packing boxes labeled with handwritten sticky notes that say things like “bison skulls” or “camel rose hips.”
Every bone, down to the direwolf's last rib, must be carefully encased in a custom foam casing. Sloth jaws, saber-toothed fangs, and a truly staggering number of ancient vertebrae will all be wrapped, cataloged, and boxed over the next two years.
On July 6, La Brea Tar Pits will close its doors for a massive renovation. When it reopens in the summer of 2028, the remodeled Hancock Park museum will be the centerpiece of the Samuel Oschin Global Center for Ice Age Research, a scientific center dedicated to an era of natural history better preserved here than anywhere else on Earth.
The new grounds, which will largely fit the footprint of the current building, will better showcase the museum's collection and explain how much the ecosystem preserved in the pits can tell us about where the current one is headed.
1. Labeled fossil containers. 2. A detail of a Colombian mammoth being restored inside the Fossil Laboratory.
But first, someone has to pack it all up: the 3.5 million fossils, each one fragile and irreplaceable, like moving a house out of a nightmare.
The same bounty that makes the Tar Pits the best place on Earth to study its portion of the late Pleistocene epoch also generates a movement of truly gigantic proportions.
Moving the museum to another part of Los Angeles is out of the question. Nature chose its location about 60,000 years ago, when crude oil that formed millions of years earlier began seeping to the surface.
For the next 49,000 years, the sticky pits captured virtually everything that fell or walked on them, from wind-blown pollen grains to hapless ancient camels and Colombian mammoths.
The result is a nearly complete record of virtually everything that lived in the place now called Los Angeles during the late Pleistocene.
Workers prepare the fossils for packaging and transport.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Fossilized direwolf skulls are displayed before being put away.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
“No city anywhere has anything comparable,” said Regan Dunn, paleobotanist and curator of the La Brea Tar Pits. “Basically, you have this trap that was here and collected all the life of Los Angeles for the last 60,000 years.”
It is an era of natural history with striking parallels to our own: climate change, extinction, devastating fires, a teetering balance between humans and the rest of the natural world.
In 2023, Dunn and fellow curator Emily Lindsey drew on the collection for a research study documenting how the collapse of biodiversity in the Ice Age coincided with the arrival of humans and the fires they struggled to contain.
“The story [at the Tar Pits] “It's critical to our understanding not only of Los Angeles, but of what's happening in the world,” said Lori Bettison-Varga, president of the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County. “The story of extinction and resilience related to climate and ecological change… is very relevant.”
It's not a story that visitors can easily follow in the current museum, staff said.
Lead preparator Laura Tewksbury, left, restores part of a fossilized mammoth hip, along with Judith Sydner-Gordon, right, inside the Fossil Lab, an active paleontology laboratory within the museum.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
The building, formally known as the George C. Page Museum, opened in 1977, when both the collection and scientists' understanding of it were significantly smaller.
Some of the early misconceptions are still reflected in the exhibits. The half-submerged mammoth sculpture in the museum's iconic open-air Lake Pit gives the common but inaccurate impression that the tar functioned like quicksand, fatally sucking its victims downward. In reality, just a few centimeters of sticky material was enough to trap a heavy animal in place until it died from exposure or fell prey to predators, who then became trapped.
Exhibits covering insects and plants, now considered a crucial part of the Ice Age ecosystem, are currently limited to two small wall displays last updated in the 1980s. The saber-toothed cat that appears like a mirage through a window, an optical illusion known as Pepper's ghost, does not reflect modern knowledge of the animal's anatomy. (The illusion takes up a lot of space and probably won't be part of the remodeled museum, Dunn said.)
Early in the planning process, the museum surveyed local community members and museum visitors about what features should be carried over into the new design.
The grassy hills surrounding the building, sloping at just the right angle for children to roll down like logs, had to stay. So did the tar pulls, an interactive exhibit where visitors test their strength against levers submerged in cubes of asphalt.
The giant outdoor family sculptures were also non-negotiable. They will remain in the next iteration, with some landscape alterations to make the scene more scientifically accurate, Bettison-Varga said.
Fossil laboratory director Stephany Potze restores a rib from a dire wolf pup.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
The new design will make better use of the building's interior, Bettison-Varga said, with more space for exhibits, storage, research and educational programs.
The lush vegetation of the leafy inner courtyard will be replaced by plants more closely related to those of the late Pleistocene, such as cypress and toyon. All currently mounted mammal skeletons from the Ice Age will return, along with four new ones: a baby bison, a baby dire wolf, a giant ground sloth built from real fossils (the one currently on display is a plaster cast), and Zedthe most complete Colombian mammoth ever found, whose giant remains have been kept in the museum for almost 20 years. He will be shown how he probably died: in combat with another male.
A corps of volunteers and employees is working around the clock to pack up the collections, which will be relocated to other NHM properties during the renovation, Dunn said.
On a recent afternoon, volunteers walked through the museum carrying carts with jaws and vertebrae carefully organized by species. Visitors peered into Fish Bowl, the glass-walled laboratory where white-coated preparers carefully clean fossils. A piece of Zed's pelvis and ribs was on a center table.
Volunteer trainer Ricky Whitman restores part of the neck vertebrae of a Colombian mammoth.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Excavations at active pits and fossil preservation will continue during the closure, although under different conditions than many fossil handlers are accustomed to.
The museum is working on mobile programming as an alternative for the approximately 34,000 schoolchildren who visit each year on field trips, virtually all of whom spend part of their visit pressed against the glass of the Fish Bowl watching scientists at work. Some of them ask questions scribbled on sheets of paper or written on their phones against the glass, and the trainers respond with their own notes. (An expanded Fish Bowl-style laboratory will also be part of the new design.)
It's going to be strange cleaning fossils without anyone watching, the volunteer preparers said.
“There's a lot of kids, neighborhood kids, that I get to see as they grow up. It's a lot of fun,” said head coach Laura Tewksbury.
