Natural asphalt (also called asphaltum, bitumen, pitch, or tar) has seeped up from the ground in this area for tens of thousands of years. Over many centuries, this tar has preserved the bones of trapped animals.

More Ice Age fossils have been found at the La Brea Tar Pits than any other site in the world--more than 600 species, from snakes and mollusks to saber-toothed cats and mammoths, for a total of more than 3.5 million fossils.

The name is redundant as "La Brea" in Spanish means "the tar." So when you say "the La Brea tar pits," you're actually saying "The the tar tar pits."

In 2007, researchers from UC Riverside discovered that the bubbles are caused by hardy forms of bacteria that consume petroleum and release methane gas. In fact, around 200 to 300 new species of bacteria have been discovered at the Tar Pits.

Dire wolves are the most common, with about 4,000 individuals represented in the collection. The remains of over 2,000 individual saber-toothed cats rank second, and coyotes rank third.

A long-term health decline among prehistoric Indians in California--including a gradual decrease in skull size--may be linked to their everyday use of tar, which served as a "superglue" for waterproofing boats and roofs, and was even used as chewing gum.

Only one human has ever been found, a partial skeleton of the La Brea Woman dated to around 10,000 calendar years (about 9,000 radiocarbon years) BP, who was 17 to 25 years old at the time of her death. Some speculated that she might be Los Angeles' very first homicide case, but since the La Brea Woman was found in close proximity to the remains of a domestic dog, researchers believed she had most likely been ceremoniously interred. It was determined in 2016, however, that the dog was much younger in date.

You won't find any dinosaurs here (except for birds, their living descendants). Dinosaurs had been extinct for 66 million years before animals and plants began to be trapped in the La Brea Tar Pits.

Of more than 100 pits, only Pit 91 is still regularly excavated by researchers and can be seen at the Pit 91 viewing station. In addition, there is an ongoing excavation called "Project 23," which involves fossil deposits that had been removed from the ground during the construction of an underground parking garage for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art next to the tar pits.

On June 7, 2013, a police diver spent more than an hour 17 feet under the surface of the Lake Pit looking for weapons in a cold case homicide investigation. The dive was successful, and he emerged with an "item of interest" related to a 2011 murder.