This article is part of our Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on how museums, galleries and auction houses are embracing new artists, new concepts and new traditions.
LOS ANGELES — Something strange happened around 13,000 years ago: megaspecies like mastodons, mammoths and dire wolves suddenly vanished.
“Why did two-thirds of large mammals die at the end of the Ice Age?” asks Emily Lindsey, a paleoecologist and associate curator and excavation site director at the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum, home to over 3.5 million Ice Age fossils.
Was it an exploding comet, a change in climate, or overhunting by humans? Scientists have spent years debating.
But increasingly, research indicates that a combination of extreme drought, heat and wildfires might be to blame.
And there’s an ominous link that applies to our current climate crisis: Us. Wildfires caused by ancient humans likely exacerbated those already-severe conditions. It’s a scenario that’s strikingly like today. And that’s why it’s so meaningful.
As the Tar Pits prepares for its first major redesign in decades, these findings may help the museum move from relic to relevant.
It couldn’t come at a better time. After being closed for a year during the pandemic, the Tar Pits is at a crossroads.
Not far from the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the Petersen Automotive Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, this 13-acre living lab is a strange juxtaposition of the very old and very new on a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard experiencing a cultural revival.
Built around a group of ancient asphalt lakes that trapped and preserved over 600 species, the museum has more Ice Age fossils than any other institution, and so much sticky stuff remains that even today, birds and cats still get caught in the muck. All it takes is a few inches to get trapped forever.
Only in L.A. could a 99 Cents Only Store sit next to subway construction next to a prehistoric landmark where greenish-black asphalt bubbles and burps methane as tourists gawk and cars honk.
This lost world doubles as a green space where kids marvel at statues of Smilodons while parents sip drinks during the concerts overflowing from LACMA next door.
If they knew the climate story beneath their feet, they might put down those drinks. If researchers here can get that message across in upcoming exhibits, then the Tar Pits might get the masses to come for more than just a stroll in the park.
Some research shows that the end of the Ice Age saw extreme heat, drought and fires, conditions that mirror today’s trends, which drastically changed the habitat — and killed off large animals.
Regan Dunn, a paleobotanist and assistant curator at the Tar Pits, calls the tree die-off and changes in vegetation that ensued during the ancient drought “a big warning about the environment.”
She and Dr. Lindsey are studying those changes across Southern California in multiple ways, including by comparing and dating charcoal and pollen cores, which indicate frequency and intensity of fires.
Researchers here say this environmental shift, which set off those large species extinctions about 13,000 years ago, is ongoing.
“That’s the start of the extinction event we’re in today,” said Lori Bettison-Varga, a geologist and the president and director of the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County, which oversees the Tar Pits. “That’s the new story the museum is trying to tell.”
How they tell that story is crucial to reaching “the kind of people who will one day move the needle,” and become next generation leaders, added Dr. Dunn.
California and the West are already in a 20-year drought, and temperatures keep rising, meaning we’re well on the path to the same shift that wiped out giant sloths and other megafauna. Estimates vary widely, but we’re already losing thousands of species annually, and many more will go as temperatures continue to rise.
Southern California once looked like an African savanna — five breeds of big cats roamed here. Today there’s one, mountain lions, which shows the scale of the die-off.
Why did big animals die while little ones lived? One theory is that smaller animals need less food. According to a study in 2016 co-authored by Dr. Lindsey, the North American die-off, at least in part, was a result of human impact.
Studies from Tar Pits Curator Emeritus John Harris found Ice Age plants starved because of low carbon dioxide, meaning they struggled to grow and reproduce. No trees meant no cover, which suggests why herbivores died from lack of food, as did large predators.
If Ice Age humans were already modifying their landscapes and causing fires, then the way modern humans are modifying landscapes is concerning. The hope is to start a conversation that spurs civic and legislative action about climate plans today and gives this venue added relevance.
“The paleoclimate perspective has real practical applications,” said Daniel Swain, a U.C.L.A. climate scientist whose recent study predicts that megafloods could submerge parts of Los Angeles and California’s Central Valley and displace 5 to 10 million people.
Dr. Swain cautioned that while past models sound wild, they actually downplay threats. That makes weaving those messages into visceral narratives — especially in audience-driven museums — tough. “The details are generally jarring. And they should be. There’s a general underestimation of the risk. But our goal as scientists is to talk about it before it happens.”
On a blistering hot recent morning, the Tar Pits staff did just that, explaining the many challenges in remaking this institution. Focusing too much on today’s problems without providing answers, or making overly bold suggestions is dangerous, too, cautions Dr. Bettison-Varga.
“How we present this information in a way it can help communities is a challenge,” she said. “If you go too far in the hope direction, it goes against the science. But we need to bring people in.”
One plan is allowing visitors to watch as fossils are excavated, cleaned and cataloged; another is building a bridge over the main tar pit and adding a large wing to the museum to showcase artifacts, many of which remain in storage.
The museum’s expansion will be led by Weiss Manfredi, the firm known for designing the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle.
La Brea means tar in Spanish, but these are real fossil fuels. Oil prospectors first found bones here in the 1800s, believing they were domestic animals or other local animals.
In 1875, William Denton, a geologitst, realized a canine tooth found here was actually ancient and published the first scientific paper on these fossils, but that work was largely ignored because Denton claimed that the bones spoke to him and his wife.
As oil prospecting boomed, so did discoveries. There were so many, the fledgling Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art (now the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County) collected and showed the Tar Pits’ huge fossil collection. Between 1913 and 1915, nearly 100 sites were excavated, yielding close to one million fossils. Most excavations were limited to that period; most new ones have been accidental.
In 2006, a mostly complete mammoth skeleton was unearthed next door, during LACMA’s parking garage construction. Workers digging a nearby subway extension in 2016 found a juvenile mammoth, later given the gender neutral name Hayden because, the Tar Pits scientists say, no one was sure what sex it was. (A Harlan’s ground sloth pelvis bone from another subway excavation was dubbed Shakira — ostensibly because hips don’t lie).
The Tar Pits still has thousands of tons of sediment boxes from past excavations and limited help, meaning it will take years to comb through everything.
Meanwhile, much of the collection remains in “suboptimal” storage, said Dr. Dunn, as she and Dr. Lindsey stepped past rows of saber-toothed mandibles and wolf skulls, stopping at what looks like an everyday log wrapped in a tent-like blue tarp. But don’t judge a branch by its cover: this is an ancient juniper. Next to the only human remains discovered at the Tar Pits — the mysterious La Brea woman — this ordinary-looking log is among the rarest pieces here, and may be a key piece to telling the climate story in the upcoming remodel.
“It’s 29,000 years old,” Dr. Dunn said studying it in the vault’s dim light. “Special.”
