Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits

Time Out says

Back in 1875, a group of amateur paleontologists discovered animal remains in the pits at Rancho La Brea, which bubbled with asphalt from a petroleum lake under what is now Hancock Park. Some 130 years later, the pros are still at work here, having dragged more than 3.5 million fossils from the mire in the intervening years. Some are up to 40,000 years old; the museum estimates that about 10,000 animals, dipping their heads in search of water before becoming trapped in the sticky asphalt that bubbles from the ground, met their deaths here.

Many of these specimens are now on display in this delightfully old-fashioned museum, which can't have changed much since it opened in 1972. Interactivity is limited to several windows on to the labs where scientists work on bone preservation; the bulk of the museum is made up of simple, instructive displays of items found in the pits. Most are bones – of jackrabbits, gophers, a 160lb bison, skunks and a 15,000lb Columbian mammoth, plus an extraordinary wall of 400 wolf skulls – though there are also early cave drawings and human accoutrements such as bowls and hair pins. Outside, the pits still bubble with black goo; in summer, you can watch paleontologists at work in the excavation of Pit 91 and inhale the nasty tang of tar in the air.