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La Brea Tar Pits to Close for Two-Year Overhaul, Reopening as Global Ice Age Research Center

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La Brea Tar Pits to Close for Two-Year Overhaul, Reopening as Global Ice Age Research Center
La Brea Tar PitsIce Age FossilsPleistocene

The La Brea Tar Pits will close on July 6 for a massive two-year renovation. During the closure, staff will carefully pack 3.5 million Ice Age fossils. The museum will reopen in 2028 as the Samuel Oschin Global Center for Ice Age Research, featuring updated exhibits that highlight lessons on extinction, resilience, and climate change. Beloved elements like grassy hills and mammoth sculptures will return alongside new displays, including the skeleton of a battle-scarred mammoth named Zed.

The La Brea Tar Pits , a renowned paleontological site in Los Angeles , will close for a two-year, mammoth-scale renovation beginning July 6. During the closure, staff will painstakingly pack 3.5 million fragile Ice Age fossils into crates, each requiring custom foam sheathing, careful cataloguing, and meticulous handling.

When the museum reopens in summer 2028, it will be the centerpiece of the Samuel Oschin Global Center for Ice Age Research, a scientific hub dedicated to studying the late Pleistocene epoch. The renovation aims to better showcase the collection and explain how the preserved ecosystem can provide lessons about extinction, resilience, and climate change relevant to today's world.

The museum's beloved features, such as grassy rolling hills, tar pulls, and mammoth sculptures, will return alongside new exhibits, including a battle-scarred mammoth skeleton named Zed. The current George C. Page Museum, built in 1977, needs updating to reflect modern scientific understanding; for instance, the iconic Lake Pit's half-submerged mammoth gives an inaccurate quicksand impression, while exhibits on insects and plants, now known as crucial to Ice Age ecosystems, are outdated.

Planning included community input, ensuring popular elements like the play hills remain. The Tar Pits' unique, 60,000-year-old record of Los Angeles life-captured naturally when petroleum seeped to the surface-offers a near-complete picture of the era, with parallels to contemporary climate change and biodiversity loss. Curators emphasize that the site's story of extinction and human arrival is globally significant, making the overhaul not just a physical renovation but a reimagining of how this geological treasure informs our future

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latimes /  🏆 11. in US

La Brea Tar Pits Ice Age Fossils Pleistocene Museum Renovation Samuel Oschin Global Center Extinction Climate Change Los Angeles Paleontology Geological Heritage

 

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