La Brea Tar Pits Museum to Close for $240M Renovation
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- La Brea Tar Pits Museum will close in July for a two-year, $240 million renovation — the first major overhaul since opening in 1977 — with New York firm Weiss/Manfredi leading the redesign after winning a 2023 design competition
- The museum's collection includes more than 2 million ice age specimens, including mastodons, saber-toothed cats, American lions, and giant short-faced bears weighing up to 2,000 pounds, making it what the International Commission on Geoheritage calls 'the richest paleontological site on Earth for terrestrial fossils of late Quaternary age'
- Roughly 90% of excavated remains are carnivores or scavengers, supporting the predator trap theory — a large herbivore like a mastodon becomes stuck in camouflaged tar seeps, its distress cries lure predators, and they too become trapped
- New exhibits will replace isolated skeleton mounts with dynamic dioramas and add a climate and extinction narrative connecting the megafauna's disappearance to today's species endangerment, while a coyote's survival story represents resilience
- The brutalist George C. Page Museum structure will keep its footprint and signature Lake Pit with fiberglass mammoths, but tropical courtyard plants will be swapped for native species typical of Pleistocene-era Los Angeles, and an outdoor classroom will be built around active excavation sites
- The renovation also targets a rebrand — associate curator Emily Lindsey and Natural History Museums of LA County president Lori Bettison-Varga framed the redesign as a chance to move beyond the site's reputation as primarily a children's museum, emphasizing that 'it is a place for everybody – cradle to cane'
Why it matters: For a $240M investment, Los Angeles is betting that a museum housing 2 million fossils and the world's only active urban ice age excavation can reframe itself from a school-field-trip destination into a serious scientific and climate-literacy institution. The redesign also reopens a debate about how to tell extinction stories to a public living through a sixth-mass-extinction moment.
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