The Ice Age Los Angeles
Can you imagine that thousands of years ago there were mammoths walking in downtown L.A.? This was their town back in the day.
As well as the town of saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, ancient bisons, giant grounds sloths and other animals. The climate was also cooler, wetter and the vegetation more lush. The period is called Ice Age because some parts of the Earth were covered by ice, that cooled our Planet.
Skeletons of these animals can be found at the La Brea Tar Pits Museum. The entrance to the museum costs $15, but you don’t necessarily need to visit it if you just want to see the pits and the ongoing projects. The access to park around the museum, called Hancock park in honor of the land donor, is free. I saw groups of school children playing and running, other kids were playing soccer on the grass — so the park isn’t used solely for research and learning, but also for recreation.
The really neat thing about paying for admission, I read, is that you can have a guided tour of the tar pits. I love hearing about facts from guides, because I can also ask additional questions (you see, I’m a curious nature — feed me facts and stories and I’ll be a happy camper). Although I never paid for the ticket, my husband did, and went to see the specimens in person with my two-year-old. But even then I think my son enjoyed the most the giant sloth sculptures outdoors and the store museum (which is free to enter anyway), and especially picking out the geodes from a huge bin. You can pick out as many stones as can fit into a tiny sack, which you get from the register, and the cost is $7.
The pits have sticky asphalt, that is often covered with leaves and other objects, and make it an unexpected trap for animals big and small (and even humans, it looks like there was one female found in the pit that lived some 10 thousand years ago). Even the saber-toothed cats, who have remarkably powerful legs, couldn’t escape them, remaining in the pits till they died. The tar preserved these huge animals, and allowed researchers find their remains later.
One of the pits at the Hancock park, showcases how they extract the fossils — it’s called the Observation Pit. Nearby there are tens of crates which house the findings from the pits. There’s a tour you can take that focuses specifically on the work done at the excavations and the later processing of the fossils.
We spent two hours at the site because we wanted to get back home for my son’s nap. When it was just 30 minutes left before departure, we headed to the L.A. County Museum of Art, which is right next to Tar Pits. There was only time left to quickly check out The Urban Light exhibition with its two hundred two antique cast iron lights, and Levitated Mass — a giant rock hanging off two walls. We also grabbed a quick snack and hot tea at the Ray’s.
The Tar Pits turned out to be a discovery for me, I’ve never heard of such phenomena, although it’s not my first time in L.A. Now any time I walk the city I cannot stop but wonder how was it when there were mammoths strolling these same streets, and saber-tooth cats sneaking on their prey.
