What to Know
- Summer of Sloths at the La Brea Tar Pits Museum opens on June 3
- The chance to "touch a real sloth fossil" is one of the engaging activities on the Self-Guided Tour
- Included with museum admission
We're often advised to "kick back," "chill out," or "slow down" when summer begins, as well as other reminders to savor the year's most golden stretch in an easygoing, unstressed sort of way.
But the friends reminding us to de-stress know that this is an "easier said than done sort of situation": Being in go-hard mode is just a way of life for so many of us.
Still, we can find inspiration in an animal that is well-known and well-loved for its syrup-like movement: the sloth.
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Viewing a real modern-era sloth can be done by calling upon Sid, the beloved two-toed sloth of Sylmar — the furry favorite resides at the Wildlife Learning Center — but you may also want to take it back, way back, to the giant sloths of the Ice Age.
That's where the La Brea Tar Pits Museum can help our sloth-directed curiosities. You may already know that the Miracle Mile destination is very sloth-centric — the giant sloth statues in Hancock Park, near the museum, are major signs of this focus — but when summer arrives, things get even slothier around the world-famous Ice Age dig site.
It is, in fact, the "Summer of Sloths" at the museum, or will be beginning June 3.
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The museum has celebrated the "Summer of Sloths" in past years by putting the spotlight on these fascinating, long-gone behemoths. These are the ancient giants we're talking about, of course, not the contemporary critters we recognize as the sloths of today.
The "Summer of Sloths" fun, which is included with museum admission, includes a Self-Guided Tour, one that gives visitors the chance to "touch a real sloth fossil."
Neat.
There's a guided tour, too, if you'd like a museum educator to illuminate the incredible world of Ice Age sloth-a-tude.
And if you head just outside the museum to Pits 3, 4, 61/67? You can enjoy the awesome opportunity "...to bring a digital Shasta ground sloth back to Hancock Park."
"Weighing in at around half a ton, these were one of the smaller ground sloth species."
Did we mean "awesome" or "slothsome"? Or perhaps "awesomely slothsome"?
For more on the "Summer of Sloths" at the mid-city wonderland of paleontology, head slooowly — well maybe not too slowly — over to this site.
