The paleontological research site has already begun packing up its collection of approximately 4 million fossils. (photo by Tabor Brewster)

As the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum prepare for the most significant transformation in the institution’s storied history – an extensive $240 million modernization project ahead of the 2028 Olympic Games – millions of fossils from creatures including dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, Columbian mammoths and giant ground sloths have already begun their careful journey to warehouses and storage facilities across Los Angeles.

“We have spent years planning for this move, because we knew that we were hoping to renovate the museum, so we have thought very carefully about all the processes involved,” said Dr. Emily Lindsey, an associate curator and excavation site director at the La Brea Tar Pits. “The most important thing is protecting the fossils and ensuring that they don’t get damaged in any way during the move.”

The museum and research lab will close for approximately two years beginning on July 7. In the meantime, every single one of the estimated 4 million fossils in the Natural History Museum’s collection at the Tar Pits will be carefully packed up and transported off site. Part of the reason for the renovation is that the astounding number of ongoing fossil discoveries has exceeded available space at the La Brea Tar Pits.

“When you go into a museum, you don’t really think about what’s going on behind the scenes,” Lindsey said. “You just sort of see the walls around you, and you don’t think what’s beyond them, but we’ve taken over a theater for this packing project, we’ve taken over one of our former galleries for this packing project … There’s dozens of people, sort of a frenzy of activity behind the walls packing things. You have to track everything, it’s a massive project, because you can’t lose any of the data that’s associated with these fossils.”

Research will continue at an off-site lab, where some of the fossils will travel. Researchers at the Tar Pits are taking precautions to ensure that none of the estimated 4 million fossils get damaged in the transition, including by creating custom-fit cradles for more complex fossils like skulls and packing specimens in bubble wrap. The Tar Pits has even hired 10 additional staff members to help move the fossils, which range from beetle shells to mammoth legs.

“Anything big is hard [to move],” Lindsey said. “Any part of a mammoth or mastodon – like a leg bone, or even the vertebrate – those are very big, and obviously take more effort to move. We have other really large animals – giant ground sloths – which are about the size of hippopotamuses. Many of their long bones are very heavy and challenging to move. And then we just have thousands of drawers, each which may contain up to 100 or more bones of different animals that need to be cushioned and carefully packed, so that everything stays in place and the bones aren’t bumping into each other, or falling out, or rolling around or getting damaged in any way.”

The fossils will be stored in meticulously climate-controlled conditions to preserve their state. Even the slightest change in temperature and humidity can have impacts on the specimens – which is one of the reasons for the site’s upgrade. The new facility will have greater climate control capabilities to prevent the growth of mold on the fossils.

“All the fossils have to be wiped down with alcohol to make sure that we’re not transporting any mold into, say, one of NHM’s warehouses, which would be disastrous,” Lindsey said.

In addition to research, excavation work will continue at the La Brea Tar Pits for at least five days a week during construction, Lindsey said.

While the construction of the reimagined museum involves minimal digging, Lindsey added that there is a chance any sort of ground work could uncover new fossils, and has hired a mitigation company to plan for that exact scenario. LACMA’s recently-completed David Geffen Galleries were delayed due to the discovery of fossils during excavation, and Metro discovered more than 500 Ice Age fossils during the construction of the D Line extension project underneath Wilshire Boulevard.

“It’s not likely that we’re going to discover much, but it is the world’s richest Ice Age fossil site, so anytime you dig a hole, there is definitely a chance of finding fossils,” Lindsey said.

Lindsey expressed excitement for the reimagined La Brea Tar Pits, which will greatly improve space for collections and increase accessibility for visitors to view the specimens and learn about life on Earth in the heart of Los Angeles.

“I’ve spent three years, along with the rest of our research team and our sort of exhibitions and education teams, working with our exhibitions designer that was hired for this project, planning out very carefully all of the exhibit – the stories we want to tell, what specimens will best tell those stories, what sort of interactives we want,” Lindsey said. “The museum now, it’s beloved and it’s wonderful, but it’s very much a sort of like mid-18th century, through mid-20th century style museum of, ‘here are big, mounted skeletons of extinct animals,’ and kind of showing what we found, but not really showing what we discovered. There’s very little talk of extinction, there’s very little talk of evolution, there’s no talk of climate change. A lot of the research that is the most compelling research we’re doing today isn’t really communicated at all in the exhibits because they were developed so long ago when both the type of science we did and the way that science is communicated in museums was really different. So being able to have a much more immersive experience for guests that is much richer in terms of the science communication is really valuable.”

Lindsey hopes that the reimagined La Brea Tar Pits will continue to inspire Angelenos curious about the natural history of Southern California.

“Most people who live in L.A. don’t know that they have one of the most important fossil sites in the world in the middle of their city,” Lindsey said. “Many people don’t even know that we’re actually a real scientific site, I think partly because people associate L.A. with all these imagined experiences – we have Hollywood, we have Disneyland, we have Universal Studios, we have tons of art museums. La Brea is such a bizarre site … so people don’t understand that this is actually an incredibly important scientific resource. It’s literally probably one of the top five most important fossil sites of any age, anywhere on Earth, and it just happens to be in the middle of our city.”

Some fossils – like that of the Columbian mammoth – are harder to move than others. (photo by Tabor Brewster)