LOS ANGELES, CA.- For the first time since the museum at La Brea Tar Pits opened in 1977, the visitor experience will change significantly, becoming more interactive and “hands-on” with new life-sized animal models and a range of touchable activities. On view starting December 21, 2018, Mammoths and Mastodons: At La Brea Tar Pits features highlights from a touring exhibition created by Chicago’s Field Museum that spotlight extraordinary Ice Age giants found both at L.A.’s iconic Tar Pits and around the world. The accompanying 3D film Titans of the Ice Age plays in the Tar Pits Theater.

These new components have been interspersed among the real Ice Age fossils currently in the museum galleries and offer a deeper understanding of mammoths and mastodons and the rest of their fascinating family tree, including early relatives and one modern-day relation—the elephant. Visitors will encounter a colossal 13-foot Columbian mammoth and several new 3D replicas loom as large as they did in the Ice Age on the museum’s floor. The surrounding interactive stations explore what these animals ate, what their habitats were like, and how they moved and behaved.

“This is an exciting update to the way we tell global stories through a local lens at La Brea Tar Pits,” said Dr. Lori Bettison-Varga, President and Director of the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County, of which the museum at the Tar Pits is a part. “The Mammoths and Mastodons experience brings these animals to life. It’s fun and interactive, and because visitors will be able to touch and interact with nearly all the exhibits, we have a new opportunity to engage them to make connections between Ice Age Los Angeles, the Tar Pits today, and what both tell us about present-day ecological change.”

Mammoths and Mastodons looks into the world of titans that lived across Asia, Africa, Europe, and more locally in North America, including the L.A. Basin and Channel Islands, before they disappeared thousands of years ago. A new gallery focuses on the family to which mammoths and mastodons belong, and features animals ranging from a juvenile bull-sized mammal from 35 million years ago to a replica of Lyuba, the famed baby woolly mammoth found in Siberia in 2007, to modern day elephants.

The exhibition also features several hands-on stations and installations. For example, visitors can experience the dynamics of a mechanical trunk and experiment with grabbing objects. They’ll feel what it’s like to balance two large tusks, and see how a big ligament helps keep a mammoth’s skull level. Visitors can even challenge their friends to a round of mammoth tusk jousting—getting a sense of what it was like for two adult male mammoths to battle it out.

Mammoths and Mastodons was created by the Field Museum, Chicago.

Mammoths and Mastodons: At La Brea Tar Pits will be up for approximately one year, and is included in the price of general museum admission.