La Brea Tar Pits

The La Brea Tar Pits are the most important Ice Age fossil site in the world — natural asphalt seeps in the middle of urban Los Angeles that have been trapping and preserving animals for over 50,000 years, producing the richest collection of Pleistocene fossils ever found. The site has yielded over 3.5 million specimens, including sabre-toothed cats, dire wolves, mammoths, giant ground sloths, and the only human remains from the Ice Age found in the LA basin.

The tar pits are active — asphalt still seeps to the surface in bubbling pools that look like something from a prehistoric landscape, and the smell of petroleum is detectable from the sidewalk. The largest pool, Lake Pit, sits next to Wilshire Boulevard with life-size replicas of mammoths appearing to struggle in the tar, creating one of LA's most surreal juxtapositions: extinct megafauna in the middle of Museum Row, with the traffic of one of America's busiest boulevards passing a few metres away.

The Page Museum (now the La Brea Tar Pits Museum) displays the fossils in a museum that allows visitors to watch the ongoing excavation through glass-walled laboratory windows — paleontologists clean and catalogue bones from pits that are still being dug. The museum's collection of dire wolf skulls — 404 of them, mounted on a single wall in graduated sizes — is one of the most striking natural history displays in any museum, demonstrating both the abundance of predators that the tar pits trapped and the power of repetition as a display technique.