La Brea Tar Pits and Museum

Located in the heart of metropolitan Los Angeles, the La Brea Tar Pits are one of the world’s most famous fossil localities. The newly named La Brea Tar Pits Museum (located in the George C. Page Museum building) displays Ice Age fossils — including saber-toothed cats, dire wolves and mammoths — from 10,000 to 40,000-year-old asphalt deposits. But visitors can also watch the processes of paleontology unfold. Every day inside the glass-enclosed Fossil Lab, scientists and volunteers prepare fossils including “Zed,” a recently discovered male Columbian mammoth.