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La Brea Tar Pits (Page Museum)
Page Museum, or La Brea Tar Pit, in LA
Overview: Built in 1977, the Page Museum La Brea Tar Pits, simply known as “La Brea Tar Pits” by everyone in Los Angeles, offers both family fun and a great learning experience of natural history. The Page Museum is located in the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits on Wilshire Blvd and Curson in the Miracle Mile area. It’s campus is connected to the LACMA.
Entrance to the Page Museum
So what do the La Brea Tar Pits, which are pools of asphalt that have been seeping up for the last tens of thousands of years, and the Page Museum have? They contains an enormous collection of fossils of wildlife from the last ice age in the world. The Page Museum itself is surrounded by a park and numerous tar pits throughout the park. The largest tar pit has a couple of wooly mammoth replicas. Inside the museum, you and the kids can check out the prehistoric fossils of sabertooth tigers, dire wolves, sloths, various birds, bears and other mammal fossils produced in the tar pools of the La Brea Tar Pits.
Exhibit at the Page Museum
In the museum is the Page Museum La Brea Tar Pits store. It’s located directly across from the entrance. As you would expect, the store offers a variety of educational products.
This feature is something that kids will like: the La Brea Tar Pits actual museum is built on the side of a hill. So, you can stroll up the path and hill behind the museum and climb up the roof of the La Brea Tar Pits museum. In addition to the novel grass rooftop is the fact that tar Pit 91 is still excavated every summer. All of this surrounded by a beautiful park.
The Tar Pit at the Page Museum
You can visit the La Brea Tar Pits without even entering the museum portion and paying! Then, make your way up to the LACMA via the Pavilion for Japanese Arts route.
Location: 5801 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036
Site: www.tarpits.org
Ph: (323) 934-7243
Cost: $7.00/adult, $4.50/seniors, students, youth (13 – 17), $2.00/kids (5 – 12)
Parking: $6.00 with Museum validation, $8.00 without. The parking lot is outdoors and off of Curson Ave.
Accessibility: The entire Page Museum is wheelchair accessible, although you may have to tread dirt and grass to see a couple of tar pits closer up.
Getting There: www.bigbluebus.com, www.metro.net, www.ladottransit.com