The smell is unmistakable, although its source is a bit confusing. I approach the entrance of the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles’ Hancock Park neighborhood, and the scent of fresh asphalt wafts through the air. It smells of construction, something that could easily be coming from behind me, where Wilshire Boulevard has been in a constant state of work for years, with the D-Line subway going in beneath. But here, the smell is stronger in the grassy park areas surrounding the museum.

The Lake Pit fronts the street, and here the scent is even more pungent. This pond contains plants and water, and a few things significantly less common: asphalt seeps, methane bubbles, and sculptures of mammoths. Yeah, this is a bit out of the ordinary in a megalopolis like Los Angeles.

The name La Brea Tar Pits is a bit of a misnomer. Tar is a man made substance. This is asphalt, naturally occurring heavy oil, created eons ago when the Los Angeles Basin was covered by water. Tiny sea creatures died, and their silicon shells would sink to the bottom. Over millions of years, sediment covered the organic material, and with heat and pressure, turned it into oil. That oilfield sits beneath this part of Los Angeles even today.

Tiny cracks in the Earth’s crust allowed some of the oil to seep to the surface in the form of asphalt. Here, rainwater would fall on it, creating small ponds. The megafauna of the ice age would see the water and go to drink, and become stuck in the sticky asphalt. They would struggle, fall, and remain forever trapped. Predators would arrive to find a seemingly easy meal, and they, too, would become unable to free themselves. And so it went for thousands of years.

Around the turn of the 20th century, the Hancock family, who owned the land here, first decided to open a commercial mine for the asphalt, and then to drill for the oil beneath. They hit those things, and also the fossils of animals that were quickly identified as long-extinct species. The family offered scientists a two year period, from 1913-15, to have access before they would go back to oil drilling. More than a million fossils later, the public was transfixed, and the area would be permanently donated for research. That research, and excavations in the pits dug by scientists, continues today.

Some of the La Brea Tar Pits can be accessed just by walking through the park area outside of the museum. Specifically, visitors can see Pit 91, which is an ongoing project today. So far, Pit 91 has unearthed the fossils of: 73 saber-toothed cats, 56 dire wolves, 6 Harlan’s ground sloths, an American mastodon, and many others. These range in age from about 44,000 to 14,000 years old. When you consider that this is just one of more than a hundred similar pits, you can see why this is such a treasure trove of fossils.

Some of the best of those fossils are on display inside the museum. A visit only takes an hour or so – a bit more if one wishes to pay extra for a supplemental 3-D film – but includes some remarkable specimens.

Easy highlights are complete skeletons of both the American mastodon and Colombian mammoth. Both are related to today’s elephants, but diverged evolutionarily millions of years ago. Mastodons are squatter, similar in size to modern elephants but with significantly larger tusks, while mammoths (outside of pigmy species) could stand fourteen feet tall at the shoulder.

These, like other megafauna of the Ice Age such as the Harlan’s ground sloth, went extinct due to a variety of factors, among them climate change (feeding such huge animals takes literally tons of foliage, and in a world that was heating and drying out that was harder to find) and being relentlessly hunted by humans of the period, who advanced technologically at a much faster rate than animal evolution was able to adapt to.

As the megafauna went extinct, so too did their predators: saber-toothed cats, American lions, dire wolves, bears, and more. These, too, are here on display. Saber-toothed cats are still a puzzle for scientists, who are not certain what their huge signature teeth were specially used for. Current theory is that these would not have been effective in hunting the way modern cats do – with decisive bites to the neck of prey – but would rather have ripped huge gashes in the belly of animals after they were knocked to the ground. Regardless of what they were for, they are certainly incredible to look at.

Dire wolves have been in the news recently after a biotech company claimed to have de-extincted the species. In reality, all they did was alter a few genes of modern gray wolves, which are not even of the same genus, to make them larger and of what is thought to be similar coloring. True dire wolves remain extinct, and a huge wall of dire wolf skulls shows just how prevalent they were in this area, with fossils of hundreds and hundreds being found here in the La Brea Tar Pits.

In addition to skeletons, the museum does its best to create models of what some animals may have looked like alive. While I am less convinced that these are true representations, they certainly capture the imagination.

The La Brea Tar Pits are still an active research site, and some of that work is possible to observe. From a large block of asphalt with fossils still inside to scientists sorting through fragments inside an observation area, eager fans of prehistoric life can imagine themselves as part of the process, and for the school-aged children who come as part of class trips, maybe some of them will be inspired to actually be so one day.

Los Angeles is a city full of unique treasures. But even among these, the La Brea Tar Pits stands alone, one of the best and largest discoveries of Ice Age fossils in the entire world. It is so incredible that I don’t even mind the asphalt smell.

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