LAist's Robert Garrova visits the La Brea Tar Pits in the lead-up to its July 6 closure. Museum educator Kay Lai walks through what longtime visitors love about the 1977 George C. Page Museum that will stay through the reimagination — from the mastodon skeletons and dire wolf skulls inside to the mammoth family sculpture in the Lake Pit out front.
The reimagined museum will feature an expanded focus on Zed, the 80-percent-complete Columbian mammoth that will stand for the first time since the Ice Age, alongside the first saber-toothed cat fossils ever discovered at the site and Pebbles the Puma, an Ice Age ancestor of the mountain lions still found in Los Angeles today.
Regan Dunn, assistant deputy director and curator at the new Samuel Oschin Global Center for Ice Age Research, describes the upgraded fossil lab that will give visitors a closer view of the work happening inside, and the climate-controlled storage that will house millions of specimens kept on site. The reimagination also includes outdoor classrooms and a one-kilometer pedestrian pathway past active excavation sites, where new discoveries are made any time a hole goes in the ground in Hancock Park.
Landmark PM serves as Owner's Representative and Project Manager for the La Brea Tar Pits reimagination, working with the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County, WEISS/MANFREDI, Gruen Associates, and Clark Construction.