Old Storage : Treasures May Emerge From Warehouse

Camille Wallace edges down a narrow back aisle of the darkened, cavernous county-owned warehouse in Santa Ana, past shelves overflowing with huge hardened plaster bundles containing prehistoric bones and past boxes filled with ancient shells and rocks.

She finds the shelf she is looking for and stops to show off a flat, brownish-yellow stone the shape of a slab of bacon.

“You know, there are people who would fly into fits of ecstasy if they could see this,” Wallace says as she traces her fingers over the delicate imprint of a now-extinct crustacean embedded in the slab.

If all goes well, those people may soon get their moment of joy.

Wallace, of Newport Beach, is a volunteer for the Natural History Foundation of Orange County, a privately financed organization founded 14 years ago in an effort to preserve archeological finds being uncovered by the dozens at development sites all over the area.

Now, after more than a decade of storing tons of fossils and artifacts that document millions of years of county history, the foundation has secured a promise from the Board of Supervisors that may allow it to bring many of its treasures out of the warehouse

one day soon.

A few of the fossils and artifacts the foundation has amassed already can be seen on display at a small museum established three years ago in the closed Eastbluff Elementary School in Newport Beach. But that facility is big enough for only about a quarter of the foundation’s holdings, and until now there has been no full-time paleontologist organizing the finds.

While foundation officials concede that their hopes for a major museum and two satellite branches are a long way from being realized, a first step toward fulfilling that dream came at a supervisors meeting last week. Without fanfare, the board unanimously approved a plan “in concept” to give the foundation a $25,000 grant to hire its first full-time, professional paleontologist.

Willing to Match Grant

The foundation is willing to match the county’s grant, according to its executive director, Dudley M. Varner, to retain the paleontologist for at least a year. In the meantime, foundation and county officials are negotiating and drawing up a proposed budget for the county grant.

If the paleontologist is hired, a major portion of that person’s job would be to examine, catalogue and help prepare for display the thousands of prehistoric specimens in the foundation’s warehouse.

That is no small task.

The 5,000-square-foot warehouse in Santa Ana that holds most of the foundation’s collection--thousands of bones, rocks, minerals, shells and artifacts--is filled with specimens that were hastily put into protective “jackets” of plaster and burlap when they were found. They then were transported to the warehouse and have been sitting there ever since.

That is what happened with what are believed to be the 4- or 5-million-year-old skeletons of an ancient whale and her calf found in 1986 near Dana Point that, like the rest of Orange County, was once under water.

The bones are encased in plaster and sit just outside the warehouse in four huge hardened bundles that look like giant white rocks.

“We think they are fairly full,” Wallace said of the blocks of plaster. “Someday we’ll have to get in there and find out what’s inside.”

The warehouse is currently overseen by Wallace, the foundation’s acting curator and a docent at the foundation’s Museum of Natural History and Science at the closed elementary school. She and other volunteers now prepare specimens for display, but Varner said no one on the volunteer staff has the professional expertise that the job requires.

“What we need is a permanent, full-time curator with the academic training to do the job,” Varner said.

Varner said the county grant will allow the foundation to take another step toward building what it hopes will become a world-class natural history museum in Orange County, an area rich in fossils of prehistoric marine animals.

When what was once the sea floor pushed its way above the water, Varner said, it was studded with the bones and imprints of fish, shelled animals and sea mammals that once swam above it. The foundation’s marine collection is considered one of the best of its kind in the country.

Also in the collection are artifacts used by ancient people and skeletons of land animals that lived in the area after it rose from the sea. Especially fascinating is an almost intact 8-foot mammoth tusk, still half embedded in plaster, that looks as if it is made of wood.

Interest in Orange County by professional archeologists (they study specimens that are the products of man) and paleontologists (they study specimens produced by nature) dates back more than 50 years, according to a report prepared by the county. But large-scale, organized preservation efforts did not begin until after the 1960s, when development in the county dramatically increased and grading and construction crews began finding fossil and artifact deposits.

In 1978, the county began using the Santa Ana warehouse to store specimens and designated the Natural History Foundation, which had been established four years earlier, to run the facility.

The warehouse began to fill with specimens, but many other objects were ending up in developers’ private collections and in museums outside the county.

In 1986, the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution requiring landowners in most cases to donate fossils and artifacts either to the county or to the Natural History Foundation. Today, developers hire paleontologists to observe grading and other major excavation projects to ensure that such finds are not destroyed in violation of the law.

The warehouse run by the foundation is now about 90% full.

What is not encased in plaster, is stored in cardboard boxes, plastic trash bags and in cabinets.

The most common items in the collection are ribs and vertebrae because animals and fish have a lot more of those kinds of bones, said Wallace. Less common are such things as ear bones, which can be used to deduce minute details about the animal from which they came.

Some of the items will be used for research by professionals and will never be seen by the public, said Wallace. Other items are so fascinating, rare or just plain beautiful that they most certainly will be.

Fossil-rich Orange County, Varner said, is one of the few counties in the state that doesn’t have a large museum of natural history.

He hopes that will be remedied soon.