Environment : Notes about your surroundings.

Museum Plans--The year ahead looks to be a big one for the Natural History Foundation of Orange County as it closes in on final plans for a permanent home, an interim site, and the possibility of several satellite facilities.

For now, the foundation will continue to run its Museum of Natural History and Science out of a former elementary school campus in Newport Beach. Plans for the county to provide a site for a 100,000-square-foot permanent facility at the planned Aliso/Woods Canyon Regional Park are progressing. The park site includes a large concentration of marine mammal fossils.

A permanent home would incorporate exhibit, office and storage space. Dudley Varner, museum executive director, is still seeking an interim place for the museum while the permanent facilities are built. The museum expects to lose its quarters on the campus, which are bit snug for its purposes in any case.

An existing site in a research and development area would be ideal, Varner said. One spot being considered is the former home of the now-defunct Briggs/Cunningham Automotive Museum in Costa Mesa. The building has 40,000 square feet and features high ceilings, ample parking and a small park in back.

Satellite sites may be in the museum’s future as well. Possibilities include a sea life center on the rebuilt Huntington Beach Pier, a facility at O’Neill Regional Park that would be dedicated to astronomy, a location in the planned Bowers Museum complex in Santa Ana, and a joint facility with UC Irvine next to the San Joaquin Freshwater Marsh Reserve and the UCI Arboretum.

Varner said the museum has also offered its assistance to the state for a nature center planned for Upper Newport Bay.

The foundation also plans to begin searching in January for its first full-time curator of paleontology.

The foundation got good news earlier this month when it received a $250,000 contract from the San Joaquin Hills tollway agency to catalogue, store and display fossils unearthed during construction of 68 miles of toll roads. “This is a nice boost to our activities,” Varner said. The museum has put together one of the nation’s largest collections of marine mammal fossils, but it often lacks the proper funds to properly store and curate the new specimens it receives.

Varner, ever ambitious and optimistic, envisions a “truly spectacular” museum complex in Orange County. “There’s a lot of folks out there waiting to be better served” in natural history education, he said. “There’s no doubt it’s going to happen.”