The back rooms of the La Brea Tar Pits are, at the moment, a maze of packing crates tagged with handwritten sticky notes that say things like “bison skulls” or “camel hip.”
Every bone, down to the last dire wolf rib, must be carefully sheathed in a custom foam shell. Sloth jaws and sabertooth fangs and a truly astonishing amount of ancient vertebrae — all of it will be swaddled, catalogued and crated for the next two years.
On July 6, the La Brea Tar Pits will close its doors for a massive renovation. When it reopens in summer 2028, the remodeled Hancock Park museum will be the centerpiece of the Samuel Oschin Global Center for Ice Age Research, a scientific hub dedicated to an era of natural history better preserved here than anywhere else on Earth.
The new grounds, which will largely hew to the current building’s footprint, will better show off the museum’s collection and explain how much the ecosystem preserved in the pits can tell us about where our current one is heading.
But first, somebody has to pack it all up — all 3.5 million fossils, each fragile and irreplaceable, like a house move out of a nightmare.
The same bounty that makes the Tar Pits the best place on Earth to study its slice of the late Pleistocene epoch also makes for a move of truly mammoth proportions.
Moving the museum to a different part of Los Angeles is out of the question. Nature chose its location some 60,000 years ago, when crude petroleum 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 onto them, from grains of pollen borne by the wind to hapless ancient camels and Columbian mammoths.
The result is a near-complete record of virtually everything that lived in the place now called Los Angeles in the late Pleistocene.
“No city anywhere has anything that’s comparable,” said Regan Dunn, a paleobotanist and curator at the La Brea Tar Pits. “You have this trap, basically, that was just sitting here and collecting all of Los Angeles life for the last 60,000 years.”
It’s an era of natural history with striking parallels to our own — climate change, extinction, devastating fires, a wobbling 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] is critical to our understanding not just 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 just so relevant.”
It’s not a story visitors can easily follow at the current museum, staff said.
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 early misconceptions are still reflected in the exhibits. The half-submerged mammoth sculpture in the museum’s iconic outdoor Lake Pit gives the common but inaccurate impression that the tar worked like quicksand, sucking its victims fatally downward. In reality, just a few inches of the sticky stuff was enough to snare a heavy animal in place until it either died of exposure or fell prey to predators, who then became trapped themselves.
Exhibits covering bugs and plants, now understood to be 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 mirage-like through a window, an optical illusion known as a Pepper’s Ghost, doesn’t reflect modern knowledge of the animal’s anatomy. (The illusion takes up a ton of space, and likely won’t be part of the remodeled museum, Dunn said.)
Early in the planning process, the museum surveyed local community members and museumgoers about which features should carry over to the new design.
The grassy hills around the building that slope at the ideal angle for children to roll down like logs — those had to stay. So did the tar pulls, an interactive exhibit where visitors test their strength against levers submerged in buckets of asphalt.
The outdoor mammoth family sculptures were also nonnegotiable. They will remain in the next iteration, with some landscape alterations to make the scene more scientifically accurate, Bettison-Varga said.
The new layout will make better use of the building’s interior, Bettison-Varga said, with more space for exhibits, storage, research and educational programs.
The lush greenery in the leafy inner courtyard will be replaced with plants more closely related to those of the late Pleistocene, such as cypress and toyon. All of the current mounted Ice Age mammal skeletons will return, along with four new ones: a baby bison, a baby dire wolf, a giant ground sloth constructed of real fossils (the one currently on display is a plaster cast) and Zed, the most complete Columbian mammoth ever found, whose giant remains have been undergoing conservation at the museum for nearly 20 years. He will be displayed as he most likely died — in combat with another male.
A corps of volunteers and employees are working nonstop to pack up the collections, which will be relocated to other NHM properties during the renovation, Dunn said.
On a recent afternoon, volunteers bustled around the museum wheeling carts of jaws and vertebrae carefully organized by species. Visitors peered into the Fish Bowl, the glass-walled lab where white-coated preparators carefully clean fossils. A piece of Zed’s pelvis and ribs sat on a center table.
Excavations at the active pits and conservation of fossils will continue during the closure, albeit in different conditions than many fossil handlers are used to.
The museum is working on mobile programming as an alternative for the roughly 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 press questions scribbled on pieces of paper or typed in their phone against the glass, and the preparators answer them with notes of their own. (An expanded Fish Bowl-type lab will be part of the new design, too.)
It’s going to be weird cleaning fossils without anybody watching, volunteer preparators said.
“There are a lot of kids, neighborhood kids, that I get to see as they grow up. It’s a lot of fun,” said Senior Preparator Laura Tewksbury.
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