La Brea Tar Pits in the context of "Smilodon populator"

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Page Museum).

LACMA was founded in 1961, splitting from the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art. Four years later, it moved to the Wilshire Boulevard complex designed by William Pereira. The museum's wealth and collections grew in the 1980s, and it added several buildings beginning in that decade and continuing in subsequent decades.

The Late Pleistocene to the beginning of the Holocene saw the extinction of the majority of the world's megafauna, typically defined as animal species having body masses over 44 kg (97 lb), which resulted in a collapse in faunal density and diversity across the globe. The extinctions during the Late Pleistocene are differentiated from previous extinctions by their extreme size bias towards large animals (with small animals being largely unaffected), the widespread absence of ecological succession to replace these extinct megafaunal species, and the regime shift of previously established faunal relationships and habitats as a consequence. The timing and severity of the extinctions varied by region and are generally thought to have been driven by humans, climatic change, or a combination of both. Human impact on megafauna populations is thought to have been driven by hunting ("overkill"), as well as possibly environmental alteration. The relative importance of human vs climatic factors in the extinctions has been the subject of long-running controversy, though some sources suggest that most scholars support at least a contributory role of humans in the extinctions.

Major extinctions occurred in Australia-New Guinea (Sahul) beginning around 50,000 years ago and in the Americas about 13,000 years ago, coinciding in time with the early human migrations into these regions. Extinctions in northern Eurasia were staggered over tens of thousands of years between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, while extinctions in the Americas were virtually simultaneous, spanning only 3,000 years at most. Overall, during the Late Pleistocene about 65% of all megafaunal species worldwide became extinct, rising to 72% in North America, 83% in South America and 88% in Australia, with all mammals over 1,000 kg (2,200 lb) becoming extinct in Australia and the Americas, and around 80% globally. Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia experienced more moderate extinctions than other regions.

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is a museum located in Exposition Park in Los Angeles, next to the California Science Center. It is the largest natural and historical museum in the Western United States, with a collection of nearly 35 million specimens and artifacts covering 4.5 billion years of history. This large collection consists of not only specimens for exhibition but also vast research collections housed on and offsite.

The museum is associated with two other museums in Greater Los Angeles: the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits in Hancock Park and the William S. Hart Ranch and Museum in Newhall. The three museums work together to achieve their common mission: "to inspire wonder, discovery, and responsibility for our natural and cultural worlds".

A Fossil-Lagerstätte (German pronunciation: [ˈlaːɡɐˌʃtɛtə] – from Lager 'storage, lair' and Stätte 'place'; pl. Lagerstätten) is a sedimentary deposit that preserves an exceptionally high amount of palaeontological information. Konzentrat-Lagerstätten preserve a high concentration of fossils, while Konservat-Lagerstätten offer exceptional fossil preservation, sometimes including preserved soft tissues. Konservat-Lagerstätten may have resulted from carcass burial in an anoxic environment with minimal bacteria, thus delaying the decomposition of both gross and fine biological features until long after a durable impression was created in the surrounding matrix. Fossil-Lagerstätten span geological time from the Neoproterozoic era to the present.

Worldwide, some of the best examples of near-perfect fossilization are the Cambrian Maotianshan shales and Burgess Shale, the Ordovician Fezouata Biota, Beecher's Trilobite Bed, and Soom Shale, the Silurian Waukesha Biota, the Devonian Hunsrück Slates and Gogo Formation, the Carboniferous Mazon Creek, the Triassic Madygen Formation, the Jurassic Posidonia Shale and Solnhofen Limestone, the Cretaceous Yixian, Santana, and Agua Nueva formations and the Tanis Fossil Site, the Eocene Fur Formation, Green River Formation, Messel Formation and Monte Bolca, the Miocene Foulden Maar and Ashfall Fossil Beds, the Pliocene Gray Fossil Site, and the Pleistocene Naracoorte Caves and La Brea Tar Pits.