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I visited La Brea Tar Pits with my mom, as a teenager. I was hooked on paleontology! Little did I know a few years later, my dad and I would discover an Ice Age site in our town–The Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, South Dakota! That was 50 years ago, this summer. I’m working on a booklet about the discovery. The Mammoth Site and museum are also now housed in a world-class building. Such things can come from visiting La Brea!

I so miss my dad. He took me here all the time as I grew up. And, every other museum in SoCsl. My three daughters benefited from that too—I took them all over too. Now I’m is going to take my granddaughters there. One man’s wonder and beautiful mind has spanned three generations. Thank you so much for sharing this story.

This was terrific. I was at La Brea with my mom when I was 5. WW2 had just ended and I had just seen Pinnochio. I had one of the songs going through my head and I always associate it with the TarPits. I saw the mammoth skull with the huge pair of tusks while it was still embedded & frankly, it scared me pretty good. There was no museum yet. But the seeps were interesting. I remember trying to avoid stepping in tar. This makes me want to go and see how much has been done since 1946. Thank you for an excellent tour.

Thank you so much for sharing this. I don’t like to travel far afield, so I’ll never visit La Brea in person. So this is really cool, getting to see your visit. Sidebar, a couple of years ago, I narrowly avoided becoming a fossil. I was hiking in the Niagara Gorge, and a landslide almost swept me off the trail and into the river. If not for a bit of overhang that I was just able to scramble under, I would have been buried at the bottom of the lower Niagara rapids by an entire landslide. It would have taken at least a million or more years for anyone to ever maybe find me. Ever since, whenever I see a fossil, I feel like a kindred spirit. I actually know what it feels like to be on the business end of geology/paleontology. When I see all these victims of the tar pits, I just feel so bad for them. What a rough way to go.

In 1974 the La Brea Pits was in rather wild condition, taking on the flora and fauna natural to L.A. Skunks, possums, redtail hawks, great horned owl and at night sometimes a visiting coyote. In the eighties Park La Brea was turned into a pretty and quite safe place. I don’t go back. I first visited the block in 1962 when it was even wilder and you could just hang and talk with the paleontologists digging in the tar. In 1974 I bought the Allman Brother’s double live album and I decided to learn how to play slide guitar so I took a purple microdot hit and rode my bicycle to the Pits with guitar in homemade bike bag. I came on to the microdot and played and played and played with that amazing smell wafting about. I taught myself to play slide guitar in about 3 hours. True story. The La Brea Tarpits. In 1962 I drew the bison skeleton and got an “A”. Thank you for the re-visit, I want to take you back to the wild time.

There is a small water hose next to one of the buildings and as usual I had my eyes on it because I saw little thin hollow bones under the muddy soil. I alerted the staff and about 9 months later they made an announcement of that find. I was on a music gig in the area at the time and we had a visit. Wow.

Visited the museum in the 1980’s. At that time there was an exhibit behind glass of the La Brea Woman. The Tar stained skeleton fully assembled rotated. As it turned it was Magically transformed into a fully formed Native American Woman. My wife and I were amazed! Standing next to us we’re a preteen Brother & Sister. The girl turns to her young Brother and says “It’s only a Hologram”! Thoroughly deflating us Old Folks! It was mentioned at the time to be the only Human remains found. In the pits. As you had not mentioned it, I would assume the exhibit was removed out of respect.

Our school used to take our class there. It was a lot cheaper. But yes, jaguars used to be native to Arizona and California until they were hunted to extinction in the early 1900s, maybe earlier. Arizona has recently seen a couple which is really cool. One seems to be a resident while others are transient. They live in Mexico now and a Mexican farmer devoted his land to their preservation.

I grew up in L.A. in the 1950s and early ’60s and recall the tar pits, and wondered why there was so little info about the place then. Thank you for this very cool tour of the museum and an introduction to the geology of the park . I seem to recall some years ago there was an explosion that happened at a constuction site nearby where they using a blow torch and a pocket of gas from the tar pits ignited! I never gave any thought to the areas (like the Baldwin Hills, and Torrance) where they were still pumpig oil when I was growing up. I took a great Intro to Geology class at UCLA in the’60s and nearly changed my major, but was told there were no jobs for women geologists, alas!

I have never been to see the tar pits. Thank you for taking me along. It was fascinating and informative. Now I would like to see it in real life. I believe it might be India where there are mud pits that elephants have gotten stuck in. But the whole community comes out to help rescue it. It is amazingly kind how much they care for the wild life around them.

Great running commentary, very detailed and informative! The La Brea Tar Pits is synonymous with this phenomenon, I’m curious if there are any other places in the US or anywhere else where this type of event has occurred? You would think that this type of event would dot the landscape of similar climate types, such as Texas or even into the Badlands areas of the South West. This area seems to be the one that most people have heard of, yet it would not be presumed to be singular in it’s occurrence. This is a well paced and extremely insightful and descriptive tour of this incredible natural historic wonder! Thank you for the tour.

Excellent article tour and all without the smell! The geology and SoCal history were interesting and delivered in a way that was informative but without talking down to the viewer. But like Yellowstone, when you visit IRL, keep your pets (and kids!) on a short leash. And like Yellowstone, be REALLY into geology… maybe more so since the panorama in LA is very different from WY.

As someone who grew up in the Los Angeles area I can remember many school field trips to the La Brea Tar Pits. Back then in the 1970s they did not have any kind of fences around the pits as I remembered them. I do recall them having signs posted warning visitors to not leave the footpaths. I don’t remember exactly what the signs said so I will just paraphrase it here. “WARNING. PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE THE DESIGNATED FOOTPATHS. WE DON’T WANT YOU TO BECOME PART OF A FUTURE EXHIBIT.”

I was stationed on the island of Iwo Jima on a coast guard LORAN station back in the late 70’s. The island is 3.5 miles wide by 7 miles long. On the north end there’s a place that produces and weeps large amounts of this jet black tar like substance. The dirt road that goes by it has to be moved periodically to avoid encroachment from this gooey mess.

I’ve never been there but now I don’t have to go. We learn so much from sources online. Interestingly enough, online sources are the main reason why there hasn’t been a worlds fair. Back then, people had to travel to distant countries to see new technology but the internet as pushed the worlds fairs into extinction.

I visited the Pits as a teen and it’s so fascinating and scary at the same time, to think what the poor animals went through trying to get free. So many lost, but found again in the museum. It almost makes me cry to think what the animals were doing, scared, helpless. It would have been a better article if the geologist kept his irritating finger out of the way.

You kept saying 10,000 yrs ago. All the mega fauna disappeared all over the world at the end of the Younger Dries at about 12,800. The mastodon bones are still washing up in Northwestern Russia. The spear points and stone tools as the native also disappeared at the same time. Later spear points are less beautiful and precise.

Correction: He said multiple times up “until the end of the last ice age.” The earth is still in an ice age, that is approximately 2.5 million years old, that has not ended. What he should have said is “the end of the last Glacial Maximum” which ended about 14,000 years ago. Scientists believe that during the last Glacial maximum the northern ice sheet was a mile thick as far south as Chicago and New York. The earth is currently in a warmer period called Inter Glacial. Inter Glacials average temperatures are 9 to 10 degrees warmer than Glacial Maximums. The earth has been cycling through these periods, Inter Glacials and Glacial maximums, every 75,000 to 125,000 years during the current ice age.

Well, the history of the tar pits far extends the fence…natural pitch pots (tar seeps) dotted the countryside–later noted to be evidence of oil reserves beneath. Native Americans used the pitch to seal their basket vessels to carry water, etc. Early settlers used the pitch to burn for heat and light. As noted…the animals would approach the larger pit, identify the water on top wade in to drink and then get stuck, dying and sinking–only for their bones to resurface. There is oil beneath Beverly Hills, which is why houses in BH are sold with oil rights…which is why they are so expensive. I knew all this doing other research.

am i the only one who sees this and sees dollar signs seeing all that oil easily acessable, wondering how much oil is in that underground oil field, how many years worth, the artifacts are truly amazing and the process of it happening is curious, how many how deep do the artifacts go, is that question worth destroying the park to find out, pump the field dry, let it dry up and have a deep hole left to explore ? try and never reach empty because its always producing oil and will always, making it yet again dollar signs for oil market, right now it looks rather stagnant and a park, useless, i say spend money to use it for oil production, but who owns it, but there is no telling how many and how old such deep artifacts could be, if the oil could ever be gotten out if its just a small amount, but another thing i noticd while filming, the exhibits of whole size artifact sizes skeletal remains were over a foot on a display case base, over a foot high isnt much and i noticed if the skeleton was placed on the floor level with you they were still larger than you but size wise compared to todays elephants and camels and big cats they were the same heights, larger ivory but same size, question is why did the tar pits arise or form and is the tar pits a result as indeed the extinctions of species both results of a major cataclysm like asteroid impact, continent shift of course, but it had to happen quickly, so many questions, no answers, not even investigating the pits could solve that riddle, i watched a show about the time frame and ages the grand canyon provides evidence for, and thats on the surface, the tar pits as deep as they go would provide more info