It's the pits: The La Brea Tar Pits and Page Museum

All I had previously known about the La Brea Tar Pits was that it smelled like ass.  It pseudo occurred to me to stop in and see what was making it smell so putrid as I oft drove down 6th St (though for a while I blamed the fetid scent on the eye sore that is Park La Brea), but I never actually took that pit stop.  But since it's description in my LP Guide fell right between the Farmers Market and the Craft and Folk Art Museum, I figured I might as well swing by during my lunch break one day.

I honestly had no clue what was going on in there and quickly found out that there was a lot more than some smelly sticky goo.  This was one of those places that is meant for kids who love learning; the kids who like to go to the planetarium, not just to get high and watch the laser light shows.  For an 8 year old boy, this place could seriously be heaven, once they got past the fact that the tar pits never captured a dinosaur (the tar pits showed up around 100k years ago, whereas Dino was killed off 64 million years prior).  However, they have bones from mammoths, wolves (not the "were" kind) and saber-tooth cats (mistakenly known as saber-tooth tigers).

The most fascinating thing I learned is that the tar (AKA... asphalt) is so sticky and thick that even an inch thick layer of it can stop a mega mammoth in its tracks.  In fact, the animals didn't die because they sank (this isn't quick sand, friends), but rather because they got stuck like flies on a fly trap and they would die from starvation or sometimes from the predators that would attack them (which is idiotic, since they would then become stuck in the muck and die themselves).  Also, this crap isn't hot, even though it looks like it's boiling.  That's just gas (which is also the thing that makes it so putrid).

Apparently, it's also not just a museum, but still an active excavation location.  Pit 91 and project 23 are still occasionally active and you can view them at work when they are.

You can also see the folks who are cleaning up and categorizing the fossils at work in the lab called fishbowl in the museum (which seems to me to be a huge and unnecessary distraction, since I can barely focus when a gust of wind blows by).





One other thing I hadn't anticipated was that the tar pits were like little black gooey ponds within a bigger park, which is named Hancock Park.  This fact blew my mind, as there is a very affluent neighborhood less than a mile away also named Hancock Park.  I thought perhaps I was falling into a mean game of chicken or the egg (was the park named after the neighborhood or the neighborhood named after the park?), but with some later research I discovered one had nothing to do with the other, besides both being funded by the same George Allan Hancock.  Another lesson learned was that La Brea literally translates to "the tar."  All this new information was actually very exciting, as it was quickly turning out that I was learning so much more about my city (um, and history) through my asinine project.

TIP: If you are a teacher, your admission is free.

http://www.tarpits.org/