Best Los Angeles tourist attraction
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My cousin recently came out to L.A. from the east coast with her boyfriend. They spent one day at Universal Studios--without my knowledge and certainly without my encouragement. But the next day, we'd made plans to get together and they had no preference as to where we went... so I took them to the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits. I must confess: I'd never actually been to the Page Museum in 7 years of living in Los Angeles. I knew about the tar pits, having heard about them from friends who grew up here and remembered elementary-school field trips there. I'd been to the LA County Museum of Art next door, and walked past the giant fenced pool on Wilshire Boulevard with its facsimile mastodon family enacting a life-and-death drama on the shore. But that's it. Finally, I had an excuse to see this icon of Los Angeles properly. We paid our $7 to enter the museum, which houses many of the skeletons that have been extracted from the prehistoric fossil graves of the tar pits over the years. You see, 40,000 years ago, the geography of what is now Los Angeles created natural traps for the native fauna, who became preserved in layers of gooey sediment. The tar pits were discovered in the early part of the 20th century and were considered one of the world's great prehistoric finds at the time. I learned a lot during our visit to the Page Museum. For instance, did you know that camels used to roam where movie starlets now live? Who knew there were camels in North America? Not me. Also, I discovered that excavation continues in the tar pits today. Inside the museum, you can observe palentologists at work in the "fishbowl" laboratory, cleaning and cataloguing fossils. Outside the museum, during summer months, you can see graduate students and volunteers digging down in one of the pits, where fossils continue to be found, packed by the thousands in the oily sludge and hardened tar. The Page Museum offers not only a fascinating glimpse into our prehistoric past, but a refreshing and surprising contrast to the usual tourist attractions of Los Angeles. No rollercoasters, movie stars or costumed characters here, just giant skeletons of L.A.'s previous residents and reminders of our distant past. Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits Hours: Admission Prices: Adults: $7.00 Admission is free on the first Tuesday of each month. |
