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Between 1905 and 1915, excavation at Rancho La Brea was at its peak. Foreign and domestic institutions became interested in acquiring fossils from the area and sent individuals or crews to collect and visiting amateurs were known to take away many souvenirs. Beginning in 1907, J. Z. Gilbert, zoology teacher at Los Angeles High School, periodically brought a work force of students to exhume specimens. Gilbert was the first to create local interest and monetary support through the Southern California Academy of Sciences and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and directed the excavation of a large "Academy Pit" in 1910. This served as the nucleus of the fossil vertebrate collections at the (then) fledgling Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art (now the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County). Merriam finally secured funds in 1912 for the first large-scale excavations and the University of California excavations yielded thousands of specimens. G. Allan Hancock fe...

Future philanthropist George C. Page’s fascination with the "tar pits" brought him to Rancho La Brea to see the fossils after moving to California from Nebraska by 1917. To his disappointment, he found that the skeletons of Ice Age animals he sought were not onsite, but seven miles away at NHM. Over the course of his long business career, Page founded the Mission Pak Company and became a pioneer developer of industrial parks in the United States. He never forgot the La Brea fossils, however, which led to his offer to finance the construction of an onsite museum that would house the tar pit fossils. Construction began in 1975 and the George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries opened to the public in 1977. When the foundation for the Page Museum was excavated in 1975, an unusual, laterally extensive, deposit was discovered which contained the largest concentration of articulated and associated specimens ever collected from Rancho La Brea. With the cooperation of the contractors, 20...

Early in 2006 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art began construction of an underground parking garage at the west end of Hancock Park. Within the confines of the future structure (~100,000 sq. ft.), 16 previously unknown asphaltic fossil deposits were discovered along with the skeleton of a near-complete Columbian mammoth. In order to hasten construction, the 16 deposits were boxed into 23 large “tree-boxes” and crated to a safe location within Hancock Park. The mammoth skeleton was mapped, plaster-jacketed, and excavated and brought to the Museum. Since the summer of 2008, staff has been excavating the boxes and preparing the mammoth material. Dubbed Project 23, the fossils retrieved from this salvage effort may double the size of the existing collections. In recent years, subsurface testing and excavations for developments in and around Hancock Park have considerably augmented previously available stratigraphic information. A re-evaluation of information recorded during the early...