Particular emphases of the collection include one of the world's largest fossil fish and shark collections, a collection of fossil marine mammals second only to the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution, important Jurassic and Cretaceous dinosaurs and other vertebrates, especially one of the best preserved skulls of Tyrannosaurus rex yet recovered, one of the most extensive paleo-ornithology collections in the world, and significant collections of Tertiary terrestrial fossils from western North America.

The Rancho La Brea collection of the LACM is housed at the George C. Page Museum of La Brea discoveries at the Rancho La Brea site. By itself the Rancho La Brea collections is the largest single collection of Late Pleistocene vertebrate fossils in the world, but the separate Vertebrate Paleontology collection also has substantial holdings from this time period, including collections from Late Pleistocene brea deposits of California other than Rancho La Brea such as McKittrick, Maricopa and Carpinteria.