begin quote from:
Once
you check out the new “Pterosaurs” exhibit at the Natural History
Museum of Los Angeles County, consider exploring the fossils strewn
across Southern California’s other institutions. La Brea Tar Pits, Ralph B. Clark …
Where can you see fossils of dinosaurs and more in Southern California?
Once you check out the new “Pterosaurs” exhibit at the Natural
History Museum of Los Angeles County, consider exploring the fossils
strewn across Southern California’s other institutions.
La Brea Tar Pits, Ralph B. Clark Regional Park Interpretive Center and the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology are some of the places you’ll find the remains of plants and animals that once lived here. From trilobites to Columbian mammoths to footprints, Southern California is fossil rich because of its geological history.
“It blows my mind to be in a place with all this geology,” says Nathan Smith, associate curator in the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum where scientists are always working on new discoveries.
They include a whale skeleton unearthed during a construction project downtown and a new whale skull found by a group of kids outside their schoolyard in Palos Verdes. As required by law, paleontologists must be called in to excavate fossilized remains anytime they’re discovered on construction sites, freeway toll-road expansions and public lands.
Discoveries are made all the time.
“We’ve also got the Tar Pits, and the cool thing about that is you can actually see the stuff still coming out, which is pretty wild,” says Smith, who recently moved to Southern California from Washington D.C. “As an outsider, I can say this: everybody here is spoiled rotten with the fossils that are all around them.”
La Brea Tar Pits, Ralph B. Clark Regional Park Interpretive Center and the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology are some of the places you’ll find the remains of plants and animals that once lived here. From trilobites to Columbian mammoths to footprints, Southern California is fossil rich because of its geological history.
“It blows my mind to be in a place with all this geology,” says Nathan Smith, associate curator in the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum where scientists are always working on new discoveries.
They include a whale skeleton unearthed during a construction project downtown and a new whale skull found by a group of kids outside their schoolyard in Palos Verdes. As required by law, paleontologists must be called in to excavate fossilized remains anytime they’re discovered on construction sites, freeway toll-road expansions and public lands.
Discoveries are made all the time.
“We’ve also got the Tar Pits, and the cool thing about that is you can actually see the stuff still coming out, which is pretty wild,” says Smith, who recently moved to Southern California from Washington D.C. “As an outsider, I can say this: everybody here is spoiled rotten with the fossils that are all around them.”
5801 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. For information, call 213-763-3499 or visit www.tarpits.org.
Get a glimpse of prehistoric Orange County through exhibits, programs and guided tours. Most of the fossils on display were found in Ralph B. Clark Regional Park. The collection includes a selection of whales and desmostylians, an extinct order of marine mammals that were truly bizarre.
8800 Rosecrans Ave., Buena Park. For information, call 714-973-3170 or visit http://ocparks.com.
This research institution and museum, which is located on the campus of The Webb Schools, boasts one of the largest and most diverse trackway collections in the country, including the only known fossilized footprints of the “bear-dog” carnivore known as Amphicyon. It was excavated in Barstow in 1964 by the museum’s namesake and his Webb students.
1175 W. Baseline Road, Claremont. For more information, call 909-624-2798 or visit www.alfmuseum.org.
This largest natural history museum in Riverside County was created a decade ago to house all of the Pleistocene fossils found during the Diamond Valley Lake excavation. Visitors will find saber-toothed cats, dire wolves and ground sloths, and they’ll get to know fossils on a first-name basis. They include “Max,” the largest mastodon found in the western U.S., and “Xena,” the Columbian mammoth.
2345 Searl Parkway, Hemet. For more information, call 951-791-0033 or visit www.westerncentermuseum.org.
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