Why Are There Fossils at the Getty Center?

Travertine stone wraps around the Getty Center, forming walkways and walls that usher visitors to the museum and frame the sweeping city views.

If you look closely at the stone, you’ll find surprises that are thousands of years old: fossils! Any attentive visitor to the Getty Center can find fossilized traces of leaves, algae, and even an animal foot in the travertine.

Getty docent Rachel Artenian shows visitors the various fossils hidden around Getty on in-person tours. Those tours are currently unavailable due to COVID-19 (head to this page for updates). However, on a recent afternoon, she shared where to find some of the coolest fossils at the Getty Center with our online audience.

Travertine: From Rome to Los Angeles

Architect Richard Meier designed the Getty Center, which opened in 1997. Meier chose to feature travertine stone in his design thanks to its historical association with public architecture, and its warmth, color, and permanence.

Travertine is a type of limestone found near hot and cold springs. It’s formed when limestone dissolves in rainwater; then, the water (saturated with dissolved limestone) surfaces as a spring. The water releases carbon dioxide gas, and the limestone recrystallizes. New layers of travertine stone form over older layers, and oftentimes, these new layers form over leaves, algae, and other living things. This process creates fossils: impressions and embedded remains of previously living material. Gas bubbles trapped between the layers also create holes in the travertine, contributing to its “Swiss cheese” texture.

The travertine at the Getty Center is an estimated 8,000 to 80,000 years old and comes from a quarry in Bagni di Tivoli, Italy. For 2,000 years, this quarry has supplied travertine used in Roman structures, including the Trevi Fountain, the Colosseum, and the colonnade of Saint Peter’s Basilica, as well as other buildings such as Lincoln Center in New York. This connection to ancient Rome provided a fitting link between the Getty Center and the Roman-style Getty Villa.

Workers removed slabs of travertine from the quarry and brought them to a factory for further cutting. A guillotine split open the pieces of travertine along the natural grain, exposing the rough texture—and fossils!

Where to Find the Fossils

Artenian said kids on her tours always get excited about the fossils (“They always say they’re ‘Cool! Really cool!’”) and are particularly good at finding more fossils beyond the ones she shows them.

But you don’t have to be a kid to go on your own fossil hunt. Now that you know fossils are hiding at the Getty Center, see if you can spot them during your next visit! Once you start looking, you may be surprised how many you can find. The fossils often appear in clusters, so if you discover one, look around that immediate area. There might be more.

You can find this feather on the west side of the Arrival Plaza.

Next to the feather, you’ll see a “feature stone” of fossilized algae and bacteria. This is just one of many feature stones around the Center, identifiable by their unique placement jutting out from the wall, and the bevy of fossils protruding from them.

“As the travertine was being cut for the Getty, these pieces would be off on the side, as the workers thought, ‘These aren’t good for what you’re doing.’ But Meier thought they were cool and would help break up the pattern,” Artenian said. “Each one is dedicated to different people involved with building the Getty Center. But there’s no way to know who—it’s only on the blueprints.”

Across from the feather and feature stone, look at the top of the half-wall adjacent to the ramp. You can see the layers of travertine, like the layers in a slice of cake.

Next, walk through the museum entrance hall and go outside to the museum courtyard. Look for this fossilized animal foot at the corner of the wall to your right. Unfortunately, we don’t know exactly what type of animal it was.

Around the corner, check out this cluster of leaves. The type of leaves indicate that the travertine formed near a lake.