Los Angeles Hotels near Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits

The La Brea Tar Pits of today are the site of the George C. Page Museum, built to make the incredibly rich fossil finds of the tar pits available to the public. The Page Museum has an ongoing fossil recovery program, and visitors can watch recently extracted fossils being cleaned and reconstructed.

The Page Museum Fossils

Most of the fossils at the Page Museum date to the last Ice Age, which lasted about 30,000 years and began around 38,000 B.C. It was an age of wooly mammoths, giant sloths, dire wolves, and saber-toothed tigers, and full-sized replicas of mammoths and tigers can be seen struggling in the tar pits around the Museum.

The hundreds of active tar pits in the La Brea Tar Pits Park have been yielding mammal fossils for nearly a century. Today researchers are focusing on their efforts on the much smaller fossilized plants, insects, and even pollen, to help them understand what appears to have been a much cooler and wetter climate in Southern California some forty millennia past. Tourists can even watch an active archaeological dig at the site of Pit 91 from late June to early September, and touch the fossilized leg bone of a giant sloth.

The Page Museum is open from 9:30 to 5:00 on weekdays and 10:00 to 5:00 on weekends and holidays. Tickets are $7.00 for adults over 18, $4.50 for seniors and those 13-7, and $2.00 for children 5-12.

Hotels near the Page Museum

Just across Wilshire Boulevard from a Red Line Station, the Radisson Wilshire Plaza Hotel provides easy access to downtown Los Angeles and Hollywood, and is only seven minutes from the Page Museum.