The The Tar Tar Pits.

No, the title is not a mistake. That's what The La Brea Tar Pits mean. La Brea is Spanish for "The Tar", so the title of the place is what is known as a tautological name.

Anyway, it's smack dab in the middle of that vast concrete jungle known as Los Angeles and I still can't quite believe that I have navigated that urban behemoth and am still alive to tell the tale.

Anyways, at the tar pits, there is a museum known as the Page Museum, which is home to over one million fossils that have been deposited in the sticky pits over the last appx. 40,000 years.

Animals, from the tiniest insects to the largest mastodons were trapped in the bubbling asphalt and suffered horrible deaths - which allow us today to reconstruct quite a bit of the flora and fauna in the area thousands of years in the past. There's also a good 3D movie called Titans of the Ice Age which I recommend you buy access to upon entry. The price of admission is a bit steep at $16 (including the movie), but then again that included some outdoorsy stuff that I just didn't have the stomach (nor the protective head gear) to face today.

An artist's idea of how a female mammoth & a baby were trapped and killed thousands of years ago.


The bubbles in the tar lake is methane.


A giant (extinct) sloth. Yes, even bigger than yours truly.


Skeleton of a mammoth.


Dire wolves. The larger, extinct forebears of the timber wolf.


The thingy on the trolley is an actual honest to fuck mammoth tusk found in the pits. The labs are behind a soundproof glass wall, where you can see technicians painstakingly brushing stuff off of old bones. How cool is that?


They even had this brilliant contraption where you could pull on metal rods enclosed in liquid tar to feel how heavy the pull would be. Great for the huge number of kids running around inside the museum (plus one big kid just kinda slouching around).