La Brea Tar Pits

Long before Los Angeles had freeways, film studios or skyscrapers, its streets were hunting grounds for sabre-toothed cats and mammoths. At La Brea Tar Pits, pools of sticky natural asphalt trapped thousands of Ice Age animals, preserving their bones in extraordinary detail. The museum brings this vanished world back to life with fossils of dire wolves, giant sloths, mammoths and other creatures recovered from the pits. Outside, the prehistoric landscape is still at work: bubbling tar, excavation sites and active research show that this is not simply a fossil collection, but an ongoing archaeological and scientific site in the middle of the city.