Mammoths, mastodons and eerie La Brea Tar Pits Museum anchor Los Angeles’ museum district

We recently spent a week in the Newport Beach/Orange County area south of Los Angeles, and dedicated one full day braving LA traffic to see some of the chief attractions in the city itself.

Hence, early on a Thursday morning, we bucked L.A. traffic and motored 45 miles north to Central Los Angeles’ Hancock Park and the La Brea Tar Pits Museum, planning a mid-afternoon lunch stop and hike from Santa Monica to Venice Beach.

Long before humankind came to the Los Angeles area in the waning years of the Ice Age, central Los Angeles grasslands were dotted with petroleum-based tar pits, where raw oil bubbled to the surface and were often then covered with a sheet of water.

Ice Age mammals, large to small, would come to these innocent looking ponds to drink, wade in and become hopelessly mired in the tarry substance, either drowning or dying of starvation. Other animals would come to prey upon the unfortunate beasts, and they too, would go to an early grave.

19th and 20th century excavation of these tar pits, many of them located on the lovely grounds of L.A.’s Hancock Park, have yielded tens of thousands of specimens from insects, tiny mammals to mammoths and mastodons, some standing 14 feet tall at the shoulder.

The park and the La Brea Tar Pits Museum offers a marvelous and gripping adventure for young to old alike. Here you can get up close and personal with the real fossils found here at the tar pits, and marvelous life-size replicas to see what these huge animals looked like in the flesh.

As we walked through the park on our way to the museum entrance, in the largest tar pit, the Lake Pit (in front of the museum entrance) features replicas of a huge mammoth female, hopelessly mired in the tarry substance, while her offspring and male counterpart look helplessly on from the shore. It’s a life-size and gripping demonstration of the horrible deaths so many animals faced.

Inside the huge museum, we found full skeletons and life-size recreations of the Columbian mammoth, which stood up to 14 feet tall at the shoulder, living from 16 million to 10,000 years ago. Nearby, the pygmy mammoth is displayed, which lived 100,000 to 10,000 years ago in such places as the Channel Islands off the California coast.

Another noteworthy display features the skulls of 400 dire wolves, some of the more than 1,600 wolf skulls found in the tar pits. Dire wolves were about twice the size of today’s ancestral gray wolves, and not to be toyed with! Another display features a moving replica of a huge ground sloth, standing 6 feet tall at the shoulder, while a giant Ice Age panther leaps upon its back to tear it to shreds.

Nearby, a section of the museum’s lab is glass-encased, and visitors can watch over the shoulders of a half dozen lab technicians as they clean and catalog various museum specimens. Another display shows a block of one of the exhumed tar pits, containing hundreds of skulls, bone fragments, teeth and more, showing what they look like encased in tar, and, after the sticky substance is removed.

Our several hours in the museum indicated that visitors from age 2 to about 80 were equally mesmerized by these graphic and towering displays. One unique display offers visitors, kids to adults, the chance to pull a steel rod out of a tar pit — a virtually impossible task; reminding visitors of the plight of so many ancient animals.

The park on Wilshire Boulevard is also home to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and across the street, the lovely Petersen Automotive Museum, which we toured in depth a few years ago. The Peterson is currently featuring several innovative special displays, including the James Bond cars and the exterior of the museum building is memorable in its own right. Alas, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and nearby Academy Museum of motion pictures will have to await another visit.

Just after midday, we headed west to Santa Monica, following a portion of the original, fabled, historic Route 66 to its western terminus at the Santa Monica Pier, (you have the option to traverse some of the Route 66 sights as the old highway winds from Chicago through eight states, then through greater Los Angeles). We later found a place to park near Venice Beach and hiked the several-mile oceanfront trail between Santa Monica and Venice, stopping to admire fabled Muscle Beach and a handful of serious bodybuilders working out.

The beachwalk is lined with quaint and funky shops and all manner of eateries. Interestingly, after eating out six straight days in Newport Beach, our best meal turned out to be linguine and clams at a funky trailside-restaurant, the Venice Whaler, right on the Venice Beach boardwalk. On a lovely, 70-degree day, nothing could be finer than that stroll along the beach with the blue-gray Pacific thundering with its mid-winter roil.

For more info: La Brea Tar Pits Museum, tarpits.org; Route 66, theroute-66.com; Santa Monica, santamonica.com; Venice Beach, visitveniceca.com.

Reach Tim at tviall@msn.com; happy travels in the West!

This article originally appeared on The Record: California travel: La Brea Tar Pits anchor Los Angeles museum district