How deep are the La Brea Tar Pits?

The La Brea Tar Pits are a famous Los Angeles destination. Now that the site has become the setting for a new show on NBC, you might be wondering how deep the La Brea Tar Pits are, and the answer will surprise you.

If you’re not familiar with the new NBC series La Brea, the essence of the plot is that a massive sinkhole opens up in Los Angeles and swallows up men, women and children. Families and friends are ripped apart and those who end up on the other side of the tar pits find themselves in a whole new world.

Though the story is fascinating, it’s also a clear work of fiction. The La Brea Tar Pits aren’t very deep at all, only a few inches at most, yet they yield great fossil treasures and still present danger to anything that gets stuck in them.

The La Brea Tar Pits aren’t as deep as you might think

The deposits of ancient asphalt have yielded a valuable cache of animal and plant fossils for years and years. Reports of mysterious springs of sticky black pitch date back to 1769, but it wasn’t until the early 1900s that the La Brea Tar Pits caught the attention of archaeologists and scientists.

The veins of asphalt have been present for centuries. Rancho La Brea was part of a Mexican land grant given to Antonio Jose Rocha in 1828. The land eventually ended up with George Allan Hancock over a century later, according to the La Brea Tar Pits website, and in the early 1900s it was found to be a treasure trove of fossils. Over the years they have yielded flora and fauna fossils as well as woolly mammoths and sabre toothed tigers.

The site is home to the George C. Page Museum, where fossils are on display and archaeologists can be seen working on new discoveries.

Though they’re only a few inches deep, the tar is sticky (and smelly) so ancient animals and humans would get stuck in it and have no hope of escaping. Unlike the show, there doesn’t seem to be a prehistoric land beneath the tar pits but it’s fun imagining what mysteries the La Brea Tar Pits could yield.