About Vertebrate Paleontology | Natural History Museum of Los Angeles
The Vertebrate Paleontology Department's lab, in which preparators prepare specimens for research and display.
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Vertebrate Paleontology Department
Vertebrate Paleontology is the study of fossil fishes, sharks, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals — animals with internal skeletons including a backbone composed of a series of vertebrae. The Museum was in part founded to house fossils from the La Brea Tar Pits that had been collected by the Southern California Academy of Sciences during the early part of the twentieth century. In 1913, Captain George Allen Hancock granted the newly founded museum a two year excavation privilege at Rancho La Brea. The three quarters of a million Ice Age fossil vertebrate specimens collected during that time added considerably to the Museum's collections.
Subsequently, the Vertebrate Paleontology Department has expanded its collections to include a diversity of vertebrate fossils ranging in age from the Ordovician to the late Pleistocene, representing every major group of fossil vertebrates, and from throughout the world. Major growth of the collections occurred in 1957 when the Museum purchased the large collection of vertebrate fossils from the western USA and northern Mexico that had been amassed by Chester Stock and his students at Caltech. Further growth occurred during the 1970s and 1980s as the urbanization of Southern California took place on the fossiliferous marine sediments that underlay coastal California. The opening of the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits in 1977 was followed by the transfer of the Rancho La Brea collections to Hancock Park, where they had originally been collected.