Mammoth on Display
Zed is ready for his star turn in the reimagined Tar Pits
Read The Wall Street Journal article about Zed!
Published February 10, 2026
The historic reimagining of La Brea Tar Pits will bring one of the museum’s most iconic specimens into the spotlight. Zed, the nearly complete Columbian mammoth, will finally be on display as an articulated fossil for visitors to admire. That means the mammoth’s bones will be reassembled, and Zed will stand tall for the first time since the Ice Age.
“The reimagining is an opportunity for us to tell new stories about life in Ice Age L.A.,” said Dr. Emily Lindsey, Associate Curator and Excavation Site Director at La Brea Tar Pits. “Zed is, quite literally, a very big story.”
Mammothly Complete Specimen
One of the things that makes Zed such a big deal among the more than 3.5 million specimens recovered from the Tar Pits is his completeness. In a fossil story told mostly in predator traps where entrapped herbivores attracted groups of hungry meat-eaters to perish in the asphalt along with their would-be prey, Zed’s remains were simply preserved by the asphalt after death, resulting in roughly 80 percent of the individual being preserved, the most complete Columbian mammoth ever found at the site.
Parking Lot Wonder
Discovered in the same LACMA underground parking lot construction next door that surfaced the vast treasure trove of Project 23 in 2008, Zed already stands out. A bulldozer took a scoop out of his skull, but the discovery forced construction to halt long enough for a more thorough excavation, resulting in Zed and 16 complete tar pits full of Pleistocene fossils. Take a look at the fossil melange contained in one of the boxes below, and you’ll see a veritable stew of different animals, mixed together over the eons. With potentially dozens of sabertoothed cats or dire wolves trapped in the same pit, identifying a single individual can be difficult, so finding a nearly complete mammoth is an asphaltic miracle. .
Mano-a-Mano Mammoths
Not only will Zed stand on his own four legs for the first time, but the display will also depict him in combat with another Columbian mammoth constructed from bones of various individuals recovered from the Tar Pits over the last century. Combining bones from multiple specimens for display is much more common than discoveries like Zed. The scene reflects Zed’s final battle around 37,000 years ago, when the 45-year-old ice-age giant may have died from the battle wounds, according to a study published in 2015.
“Ongoing excavations in our park are revealing new stories daily—who knows what we’ll find in the next 100 years,” says Lindsey. “La Brea Tar Pits is the gift that keeps on giving.”
