La Brea Tar Pits

Plan around this before you go: the museum closed on 7 July 2026 for a two-year renovation. Many outdoor areas of Hancock Park remain open, the excavations and the research carry on, and behind-the-scenes experiences are still running, but the indoor exhibitions are paused. Members' admission stays free, and a new Samuel Oschin Global Center for Ice Age Research is part of what is being built.

The park is worth the visit regardless, because the thing that makes it extraordinary is happening in the ground rather than in a display case. Crude oil seeps upward along the 6th Street Fault from the Salt Lake Oil Field, which lies under much of the Fairfax District. When it reaches the surface the lighter fractions evaporate or biodegrade and what is left is asphalt, pooling and hardening into stubby mounds you can walk past. This has been going on for tens of thousands of years.

The trap works cruelly well. A deposit thick enough to catch an animal gets covered by water, dust and leaves. Something wanders in and sticks. A predator sees an easy meal, comes in after it, and sticks too. Palaeontologists call it a predator trap. As the bones sank, asphalt soaked into them and stained them dark brown or black, then set around them. The oldest material dated from the seeps is about 38,000 years old.

The big mammals get the attention, but the same asphalt holds microfossils: wood, plant matter, rodent bones, insects, molluscs, seeds, leaves and pollen grains, which is what lets researchers rebuild the whole landscape rather than a list of large animals.

People used it long before anyone studied it. The Chumash and Tongva sealed plank boats with this tar, caulking redwood that had drifted into the Santa Barbara Channel. In 1769 the Portola expedition made the first written record, and Juan Crespi described springs of tar boiling up out of the ground, enough, the scouts said, to caulk many vessels.