Discovering Fossils Is Easy, but Finding Places for Them Isn’t

Placed carefully on the floor of a Quonset hut near a future toll road in south Orange County, the six-foot tusk of a prehistoric mammoth lies gleaming on its side.

There are fossils of scallops and the remains of a duckbill dinosaur. Piled high on a tarp outside, a stack of ancient whale bones is mixed with the teeth of the dozens of sharks that may have eaten it. And nearby, a pile of fossilized logs speaks of a prehistoric Southern California covered by avocado-like trees that were 60 feet high.

“Projects like this don’t come along very often,” said Mark Roeder, a paleontologist monitoring construction of the Eastern Transportation Corridor, where 30,000 prehistoric specimens have been found since 1995.

Sparked by a series of massive development projects coupled with an aggressive county policy to protect what the bulldozers uncover, these and other finds have marked Orange County in recent years as a significant paleontological site. In breadth and importance, some scientists say, the area rivals the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles. But the explosion of digging has also created a problem for would-be researchers: where to put the stuff in a county without a major natural history museum.

“In Orange County, everyone wants you to pick it up, but there’s no place to put it down,” said Lawrence Barnes, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the author of numerous articles on Orange County’s bones.

In 1977, Orange County officials enacted a model paleontological protection policy that has been copied nationwide. Under the policy, developers are required to have construction sites monitored by paleontologists with the authority to temporarily halt work to recover fossils and bones.

“The developer is required to protect the specimens and offer them to the county,” said Tim Miller, manager of the county’s Harbors, Beaches and Parks department, which oversees the program. “The county can then either store them or give them to somebody else.”

The lack of exhibition space is a result of the explosion in recent years of paleontological discoveries in Orange County.

More than 10,000 bones were uncovered during construction of the San Joaquin Hills Transportation Corridor, the toll road connecting Newport Beach and San Juan Capistrano that was completed last year. More recently, treasures of fossilized remains have been found in Irvine and Newport Beach. And as many as 30,000 bones and fossils recovered so far during grading of the Eastern Transportation Corridor sit in boxes and on shelves awaiting a final destination in that cramped Quonset hut near the construction zone.

Until recently, the bones would have been stored in a 10,000-square-foot warehouse the county maintains for the purpose in Santa Ana. Four years ago, however, the warehouse reached capacity with about half a million specimens. And except for an interpretive center at Clark Regional Park, a small private museum in San Juan Capistrano and a handful of modest centers elsewhere, the county has no other natural history facility.

“In just about every project, the fossils are being stored by the individual firms that did the work,” said Steve Conkling, a paleontologist and president of the Natural History Association of Orange County, which operates the museum in San Juan Capistrano.

A private group opened a large museum in Mission Viejo in 1991, he said, but had to close it within six months because of the recession and a bad location. “We are all nearing capacity at our storage facilities,” Conkling said. “What has to happen is that someplace in Orange County that can accept collections has to be found.”

Miller could be part of the solution.

County officials under his direction recently added a wing to the paleontology warehouse, which will increase its size by 600 square feet. A $350,000 federal grant will be used either to improve existing facilities or build new ones. Miller’s office is preparing a proposal that, if adopted by the county Board of Supervisors, will probably help keep the bones in Orange County.

Under Miller’s plan, the county would charge developers for storing, cataloging and exhibiting fossils and bones found at construction sites. The Natural History Association of Orange County would oversee the work. The specimens would be exhibited at nine county parks with an eye toward creating a central museum, perhaps in a blimp hangar at the Marine Corps Air Station at Tustin.

County supervisors are expected to consider the matter by year’s end.

Back along the Eastern Transportation Corridor, meanwhile, the fossils and bones just keep piling up. Following closely behind the scrapers and bulldozers, monitors wearing hard hats and bright orange vests spend about 10 hours a day peering intently at the ground. When something potentially significant is found, they rope off the area. Common specimens are left in the ground, but anything unusual is quickly removed.

“Anything you can think of we probably have a fossil,” Roeder said.

Among the specimens recovered so far are the remains of prehistoric camels, sea lions, whales and other animals ranging from 10,000 million to 75 million years old.

Conkling has a description for what’s going on. “The history of Orange County,” he says, “is being rewritten by paleontologists.”