Day Twenty-Three
The last day of our awesome trip to North America. After packing and leaving our gear at reception, we took a train and then a bus down to the La Brea Tar Pits. Via Starbucks obviously. The La Brea Tar Pits are located within Hancock Park, a small grassy area, with a few fenced off pits and excavation areas, and two museums. One of these is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which we bypassed, just briefly checking out some of the outdoor sculptures. The other is the George C. Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits, which is where we headed.
If you don’t know what tar pits are, go do some reading. Basically they are places where oil seeps up and forms pools. As the oil reaches the surface, lighter fractions of the oil degrade or evaporate, leaving a layer of thicker tar (asphalt). The La Brea pits were initially used as mines for tar, and that is why they have been uncovered, but they were also found to be excellent sources of bones of many species, especially Pleistocene giants like mammoths. This is because animals would periodically stumble into the pits and become stuck in the tar, and their bones were often well preserved. As such, the pits are now a protected natural landmark, and have been extensively studied. Over 3.5 million fossils have been recovered so far, dating back only 38,000 years.
The pits themselves can be viewed for free, there are several large pools dotted around, black and bubbling, and fascinating to watch. There are also numerous sculptures of Pleistocene creatures around the pits, and some even in the pits. The Museum itself is sunken into a grassy mound, and entry costs $12 for adults. It’s actually a fairly small museum, and is viewed via a loop around a single-storey building with a redundant central garden, but it packs a lot in. There are a lot of impressive displays and educational signs, so it’s easy to spend a couple of hours here. The first section contains a series of skeletons, including of Prehistoric Bison, American Camel, American Mastodon, Colombian Mammoth, Ground Sloths, American Jaguar and Sabre-toothed Cat, as well as many smaller mammals and birds, all of which are hugely exciting. These are accompanied by displays about the lives of Pleistocene humans in California, and their interactions with the local fauna.
Ahead was probably the most awe-inspiring display – a wall covered with the skulls of Dire Wolves. There were 404 covering a huge wall, and this really gives an idea of the scope of this place and how deadly the tar pits were. There were also displays of the large raptors that lived in the area, including skeletons and models. Nearby was a glass-fronted lab, in which volunteers were working on fossils, which was cool to see – although I wouldn’t want to be watched by tourists all day. The final part of the museum featured models, notably of a Sabre-tooth Cat attacking a Ground Sloth. There was also a large timeline chronicling the extinction times of various taxa, which was fascinating. A couple of small theatres played films about the pits, but we didn’t see these.
Finally there was the gift shop. It’s always interesting comparing the gift shops of zoos, most of which do not contain anything worth buying (although I did pick up a book about the founder of the San Diego Safari Park at that zoo). But Museums often have decent books for sale, and this was no different, and I picked up a most interesting one – Once and Future Giants, by Sharon Levy, which looks at the global extinctions of megafauna during the Pleistocene, and the ideas of rewilding. Overall, it’s a very thought-provoking museum that is definitely worth visiting and bound to appeal to ZooChatters.
After exploring Hancock Park some more, we took the bus and train combo back to Hollywood, where we spent the afternoon. We spent an hour at another museum, the Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, which was essentially the same as its other incarnations we had seen in Amsterdam and Sydney, but still quite fun. Nearby was the El Capitan Theatre, which is a Disney-owned single-screen cinema, restored to its 1926 glory (the same era as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre). Here we saw the latest Disney movie, Maleficent, which was preceded by a live magic show. After that, we picked up our gear from the hotel, and got a shuttle to the airport. After checking in, we had pizza and beer for dinner, before boarding the Qantas A380 that would take us back to Melbourne. Not a bad trip all up!
