The hook
In the middle of the city, next to the art museums, cold black asphalt still bubbles up out of the ground the same way it trapped mammoths for the last forty thousand years.
01Why it's worth it
This is the richest Ice Age fossil site on Earth, and the only one being actively dug in the middle of a major city. For tens of thousands of years crude oil has seeped to the surface here as sticky asphalt, and for tens of thousands of years animals blundered into it and stuck: dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, mammoths, giant sloths, whose bones, more than a million of them, came out of the ground you're standing on. They're still coming out, and you can watch paleontologists work the pits and the lab through the glass. The grounds are free to walk, asphalt oozing up through the lawn and roped off, a life-size mammoth sinking into the big pit out front. It is genuinely strange to stand in traffic-noise Los Angeles directly on top of the Pleistocene.
02How to experience it
It's on Wilshire in the Miracle Mile, about six hours from the Bay, right next to LACMA. The park and the pits are free to wander; the museum with the fossils and the working lab charges admission. An easy couple of hours, and a natural pairing with the museums right there.