Farewell, my Smilodon: La Brea Tar Pits to close for two years

7 min Click here to listen to this article Share via Close extra sharing options Email Facebook X LinkedIn Threads Reddit WhatsApp Copy Link URL Copied! Print 0:00 0:00 1x This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here. 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. 1. Bins of labeled fossils. 2. A detail of a Columbian mammoth being restored inside the Fossil Lab. 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. Workers prepare fossils to be packaged and moved. (Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times) Fossilized dire wolf skulls are displayed before being packed away. (Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times) “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. Senior Preparator Laura Tewksbury, left, restores part of a fossilized mammoth hip, alongside Judith Sydner-Gordon, right, inside the Fossil Lab — an active paleontology lab within the museum. (Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times) 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.) The La Brea Tar Pits were recognized as one of the world’s First 100 IUGS Geological Heritage Sites for their stunning Ice Age fossil record. Early in the planning process, the museum surveyed local community members and museumgoers about

Farewell, my Smilodon: La Brea Tar Pits to close for two years

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