La Brea Tar Pits Expedition, Los Angeles
La Brea Tar Pits Expedition, Los Angeles
Category
🏖
TravelTranscript
00:00Hey everybody, Josh and Amy from CaliforniaThroughMyLens.com. Today we're in Los Angeles exploring the La Brea Tar Pits.
00:13The La Brea Tar Pits in the heart of Los Angeles are one of the city's most unique places to explore.
00:19The Tar Pits and the museum are located in the Hancock Park area of the city,
00:23and they're where natural asphalt has seeped up through the ground over tens of thousands of years.
00:29The outdoor area is free to explore and there's lots of different Tar Pits to see,
00:33including the main one in the front which has an example of what it would have looked like for an animal to be stuck in the Tar Pit.
00:41Pit 9 is super small, but it trapped at least 27 Colombian mammoths in it.
00:47This little Tar Pit right here.
00:51So this is how all the 27 mammoths fit, is that all the bones just get jumbled together in the tar.
00:59This is a really fascinating area to explore and I'll show you more on the active dig site after going to the museum.
01:08Alright, let's go to the museum.
01:12A lot of people just see the outside, but I highly recommend you go into the museum.
01:16It does cost, but it's one of the most interesting places to explore in Los Angeles because of the unique scientific history.
01:23After paying the fee, we began to walk around the small central building.
01:27It's not that big, but it does have a lot of unique exhibits to see.
01:32By far the most visited exhibit is the huge Colombian mammoth they have on display.
01:38This is truly an amazing thing to see in person as this animal was massive.
01:43That's a Colombian mammoth and it's considered average size.
01:48Next to that they have the wall of direwolf skulls.
01:52They've found thousands of direwolves here because they would come attack the mammoths that were stuck in the tar and then they themselves would fall in the tar as well.
02:01This is my favorite section, there's over 400 of the 1600 direwolf skulls they've found here.
02:08As you continue around the museum, you can go to the fossil lab where you can see them actually working to clean and preserve the fossils that they've found in the tar.
02:17Lastly, there's a tar pull area where you can test how hard it is to pull yourself out of the tar and there's a skeleton of a ground sloth as well.
02:32This is just a few of the things you can see in the museum and there's a theater that shows more about the history of the area.
02:39In the middle of the museum there's an atrium which you can walk through that has lots of plant life, a small waterfall and a little creek.
02:48After exploring the museum, we went back outside and went up to the second floor where you can look out over the tar pits and down on the atrium as well.
02:57What do you think?
02:59It's pretty cool.
03:01We're leaving the museum and going to check out one of the current dig sites, Project 23.
03:06The rest of the La Brea tar pits are located outside of the central area.
03:10If you continue walking along the path, you can go to an actual dig site where they dig during the summer to try to find new fossils.
03:18There wasn't any digging going on when we were there but it's still cool to see.
03:24There's a half dozen or more pits that you can see around the area and when you pay for the museum entrance, they'll give you a map to all of them.
03:32So you can go around to these pits but most of them are not currently active. The only one that's active right now is Project 23.
03:39It's still cool to see these old pits where there's still some tar in them.
03:43And keep your eyes peeled as you may even see the tar bubbling in one of these pits.
03:48Thanks so much for exploring the La Brea tar pits with us. One of the most unique things you can visit in all of Los Angeles.
03:54Be sure to like and subscribe and we'll see you on the next video.