This is my first visit to the La Brea tar pits, after years coming to LA on a regular basis. For some reason, I have never taken the time to explore the tar pits and neither other attractions in the area, like the LACMA nearby. I finally did this time, with my family, and I am glad I did.
The site is composed of the park with several open exhibits, a museum, and the tar pits. The museum and the tar pit requires admission tickets, but there are several scheduled activities in the park, including paleontologists digging and cleaning fossils. There are a lot of scheduled activities in the open air exhibits, where real paleontologists are still excavating/processing fossils retrieved from the pits. The museum is an ice age/dinosaur museum with exhibits similar to the ice age section of other natural history museums elsewhere, although it is always fun to look at reconstructed dinosaur skeletons and watch their educational movies.
La Brea is a famous attraction and a nice place to spend some time. I would not classify it as a must, as we've been to other fossil excavation sites and natural history museums before, but I am happy to have done it, and it would make a terrific day if combined with other museums in the area, like the LACMA or the Peterson automotive.