La Brea Tar Pits to close July 6 for two-year renovation
The La Brea Tar Pits and George C. Page Museum will close July 6 for a roughly two-year renovation. The redesign will retain signature exhibits and add the upright skeleton of Zed, an 80-percent-complete Columbian mammoth, plus a new outdoor amphitheater.
LOS ANGELES — The La Brea Tar Pits and its on-site museum will close on July 6 for a major two-year renovation, ending public access to one of the world's most active Ice Age fossil excavation sites until 2028.
The George C. Page Museum, which opened in 1977 on Wilshire Boulevard, will undergo a multimillion-dollar overhaul of its exhibits and research facilities. The site, owned by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, sits next to LACMA's newly opened David Geffen Galleries in the city's Miracle Mile corridor.
The redesign will retain the museum's signature attractions, including the mastodon skeletons, dire wolf skulls and the Lake Pit sculptures depicting a mammoth family in distress, said museum educator Kay Lai. New interactive exhibits will give visitors a closer look at the active paleontology research that continues on the property.
A centerpiece of the renovation will be the reassembled skeleton of Zed, the 80-percent-complete Columbian mammoth recovered at the site. According to the museum, Zed will be mounted upright for the first time since the Ice Age. The redesign will also highlight the first saber-toothed cat fossils ever discovered at La Brea and a selection of species the museum classifies as Ice Age survivors.
New renderings released by the institution show plans for an outdoor amphitheater intended for public programming.
Visitors have until July 6 to see the existing museum. The site is open daily from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 5801 Wilshire Blvd. Admission is required for non-members. The museum has not announced a firm reopening date but said the closure is expected to last roughly two years.