Environment : Notes about your surroundings.

Museum Update--A location near Pectin Reef, one of the county’s richest paleontological sites, looks like a likely candidate to become the permanent home of the Museum of Natural History and Science, now housed in a former elementary school in Newport Beach.

The marine fossil trove, off Moulton Parkway on Aliso Creek, is part of the county’s proposed Aliso/Wood Canyons Regional Park. A general development plan for the 3,200-acre park includes a site for a museum building of 100,000 square feet, according to Eric Jessen, the county’s chief planner. The plan is about 90% complete and at least three months away from approval by the Board of Supervisors, Jessen said.

“We’re certainly carefully studying the county’s proposal,” said Dudley Varner, the museum’s executive director, who called the site “a highly desirable location.” Pectin Reef is the source of many specimens in the museum’s marine fossil collection, one of the biggest in the country.

A building of 100,000 square feet would allow the consolidation of exhibit, storage and administrative space (a county warehouse is overflowing with fossils). Finding a permanent museum site has occupied Varner since he took his post in 1987. Dozens of sites have been considered, he said. The county’s Pectin Reef proposal will be discussed at a museum board meeting Wednesday.

Varner and the board are also searching for an interim site to house the museum in the estimated five years it would take to build a permanent facility. They are seeking a building with high ceilings that has not been highly compartmentalized. Heading the list are several industrial buildings near John Wayne Airport. An interim site would probably incorporate large-scale animated dinosaurs and other creatures created by a local company called Dinamation.

At one time, Varner had hoped to find a permanent site near Upper Newport Bay, but land prices and traffic considerations have apparently nixed that idea. Earlier last week, county supervisors accepted 114 acres bordering the bay from the Irvine Co. for a regional park. A $2.1-million interpretive center is planned for the site, to be operated jointly by the county and the state, but the donated property is too narrow to accommodate a large museum facility, Jessen said.

Also, the Irvine Co. has ruled out construction on most of the land.