Lots of Hubbub At The La Brea Tar Pits This Past Week

There has been a lot of action at the La Brea Tar Pits in the last week as scientific excavation resumes after 7 years, the long hidden Observation Pit reopens, and the $650 million transformation of the LACMA campus abutting the Tar Pits is redesigned to be more environmentally and aesthetically friendly to the world's densest collection of prehistoric fossils.

Regarding the LACMA revamp, Swiss architect Peter Zumthor has modified his grand plans to transform the museum campus by altering the shape of his building to stretch across bustling Wilshire Boulevard and away from the neighboring Tar Pits. Critics of the original design, which would replace four aging buildings, had raised environmental concerns that it would have cast a shadow over tar pits rich with Ice Age fossils. The new design incorporates a bridge over Wilshire where visitors inside the museum could walk over Wilshire Boulevard and glance down at an expanse of the road, while drivers in cars below could look up into the perimeter of the glass-walled museum. As before, the plan calls for the entire building to be perched about 30 feet above the ground on glass cylinders. Learn more here.

Back at the La Brea Tar Pits, the George C. Page Museum is debuting a host of improvements this Summer, chief of which is the reopening after several decades of the Observation Pit, the first fossil museum to open in Los Angeles and the only fossil museum in L.A. until the Page opened in 1977. The museum has also added a new Excavator Tour this week to explore L.A.'s Ice Age past, and the Woolly Mammoths, giant sloths and Saber-tooth tigers have been returned to their original places and positions of demise after years of restoration. 

The most exciting aspect of the reopening of the Observation Pit (which overlooks the pool of bubbling, naturally occurring asphalt called Pit 91) is that scientists and paleontologists are now back to work there after digging was halted in 2007 to focus on a trove of fossils unearthed during a nearby construction project named Project 23.  The public can once again look on as workers dig for prehistoric treasure to add to the five million fossils uncovered at the tar pits, of which almost a million came from Pit 91. Also, many of the museum’s excavators are still working on Project 23 and visitors can watch the Project 23 team from behind a fence.