Smilodon Farewell: The Tar Pits Get a Big Make‑over

The back rooms of the La Brea Tar Pits are now a maze of packing crates. Each crate has a handwritten note that says things like “bison skulls” or “camel hip. ” All bones, even the smallest dire wolf rib, are wrapped in foam and boxed. The museum will close on July 6 for a huge renovation. It will reopen in summer 2028 as the center of the Samuel Oschin Global Center for Ice Age Research. The new design will stay close to the old building’s footprint but will show the collection better and explain how the ancient ecosystem informs our future. First, a team must pack all 3. 5 million fossils. Each one is fragile and irreplaceable, like moving a house out of a nightmare. The Tar Pits are the best place to study the late Pleistocene because nature chose this spot 60, 000 years ago. Petroleum seeped to the surface and trapped everything that fell or walked into it. The result is a nearly complete record of life in what is now Los Angeles. “No city anywhere has anything that’s comparable, ” says a paleobotanist who works there. The trap collected life for 60, 000 years. The site shows parallels to today: climate change, extinction, fires, and the balance between humans and nature. In 2023, researchers used the collection to study how biodiversity collapsed with human arrival and fire use. Visitors can’t easily follow this story at the current museum. The building opened in 1977, when the collection was smaller and some ideas were wrong.For example, a half‑submerged mammoth sculpture gives the false idea that tar worked like quicksand. In reality, only a few inches of sticky stuff could hold a heavy animal until it died or was eaten. Exhibits on bugs and plants are outdated, showing only two wall displays from the 1980s. A saber‑toothed cat illusion takes up a lot of space and is not accurate. During early planning, the museum asked locals what should stay in the new design. The grassy hills for children to roll down and the tar pulls interactive exhibit will remain. Outdoor mammoth sculptures will stay, with some landscape changes for scientific accuracy. The new layout will use the interior better, adding space for exhibits, storage, research and education. The courtyard will replace its plants with ones from the late Pleistocene, like cypress and toyon. All current mounted skeletons will return, plus four new ones: a baby bison, a baby dire wolf, a real‑fossil giant ground sloth, and Zed, the most complete Columbian mammoth ever found. Volunteers and staff are working nonstop to pack up the collections, which will be stored at other NHM sites during renovation. During the closure, excavations and conservation continue under different conditions. The museum is creating mobile programs for the 34, 000 schoolchildren who visit each year. It will be strange to clean fossils without anyone watching, volunteers say.