Los Angeles: La Brea Tar Pits

After two years of Spring Break trips to Florida for adventures with nature, Spring Training Baseball, and cultural sights, this year Dear Husband and I decided to visit my old dissertation adviser, who has retired to California. #1 on my Los Angeles bucket list was to visit the La Brea Tar Pits, ever since my aunt gave me a book about dinosaurs coming up out of the tar to visit modern-day LA. Besides the whole childhood dream thing, this is a really cool site that combines science with history--the gorgeous weather for the outdoor parts didn't hurt--and it is the kind of thing we couldn't do anywhere else we have ever visited. (Our usual go-to's are art museums and botanical gardens, ever since our honeymoon.)

Our adventure back in time started with hopping on a city bus for the hour-long ride from downtown Santa Monica to the heart of LA. Public transit was free for the Super Tuesday Election Day. We read books and gawked at the urban scenery. Second happy surprise was that the museum was free (first Tuesday of the month during the off season). We joined a 45-minute walking tour of the site, which originally belonged to the Hancock family. In the late 19th century, they extracted the "tar" (really asphalt) and threw away the bones they found (dumb sheep), until it became obvious that these weren't ordinary bones (and fangs!).

Since the early 1900s, a million fossils have been removed, cleaned, sorted, and identified. The first iteration of the museum opened in 1913 already! They're currently in the middle of a big project, combing through 23 bins of material removed when the county art museum is next door built a parking garage. Check out the saber-toothed cat skull on display in "the lab" (above). We had not realized that the pits are all man made, either to mine asphalt or to look for fossils, and none of the ones being actively excavated were open to the public the day we went. Instead, we took part in a research project on artificial reality and teaching visitors about ecosystems, climate change, and the scientific method. We also watched a 3-D film--"Titans of the Ice Age"--which really played up the whole "sheets of ice" theme, although the AR study had taught us that the average temperatures in the Los Angeles area during the Pleistocene Era were only 16 degrees cooler than now, so the environment looked much the same. In fact, I think our tour get said 95% of the species found fossilized in the pits still live there day!

Wall of ~400 dire wolf skulls, one quarter of their collection.

Animatronic saber-toothed predator attacking a large ground sloth. 

It's no wonder why the latter died out.

I'll leave you with this photo of me being silly in the gift shop:

Editor's Note: Stay tuned for more Santa Monica/LA sights and out-of-this-world experiences!