Age-Old Money Woes Hold Up Museum : Showplace for County’s Abundant Artifacts Long Overdue, Advocates Say

Flake by painstaking flake, the sloping skull of a long-extinct whale emerged from an eight-foot-long cocoon of sedimentary earth and plaster of Paris.

“I don’t want to chip any of the fragile bone away,” said Marian Meyer quietly as she scraped at the partially exposed fossil that sat on a pallet in the back room of RMW Paleontologists, a small research company in a light-industrial complex on Via Fabricante in Mission Viejo.

Armed with an assortment of dental tools and delicate chisels, workers at the research center have been laboring since January to uncover the 10-million-year-old fossil, only the second of its kind in the world.

The bone, part of a 40-foot prehistoric baleen whale, was discovered accidently last summer at a Laguna Niguel construction site along with thousands of other marine fossils.

Once extricated from the silty tomb that helped preserve it for millions of years, the whale bone will be sent to the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History for casting, study and storage.

“We work very closely with (Los Angeles),” said paleontologist Rod Raschke, who is supervising the work on the whale bone. “They have the facility; we don’t.”

There is the rub, say boosters of a proposed Orange County Museum of Natural History and Science.

More than a decade since a county-commissioned task force recommended a centralized museum system, Orange County remains the only urbanized county in Southern California without a permanent museum of natural history and science.

To be sure, there are scores of collections and small museums scattered throughout the county. But as the population--especially in South County--continues to climb, proponents of a centralized museum say the time has come for Orange County to add a world-class museum to its growing number of institutions for the arts and sciences.

“The growing population feels deprived” by having no museum to call its own, said Dudley M. Varner, executive director of the private, nonprofit Natural History Foundation of Orange County. “We hear it all the time.”

Without a major museum, researchers and county officials say, there is no place for Orange County residents to view the hundreds of thousands of paleontological and archeological discoveries that have been turned up in the South County over the years.

And just as important, there is no adequate place for researchers to study the burgeoning number of local artifacts or to store them in a way that ensures there will be no damage to the valuable finds.

“If we had the setup,” Raschke said, “we could be doing more of our own research.”

To that end, members of the Natural History Foundation of Orange County have been working with the county to design a state of the art natural history and science museum in South Orange County.

Although the site has already been established, architectural drawings have been completed and there are plenty of Orange County artifacts to fill a world-class museum, construction is at least five years away.

“It’s really just a question of how to pay for it,” said Varner, whose foundation is spearheading the drive to establish the permanent museum. “I don’t think you can open the doors for less than $40 million.”

For that kind of money, Varner envisions a 100,000-square-foot facility on a 25-acre site at Pectin Reef, in the uppermost corner of the newly opened Aliso and Wood Canyons Regional Park in Aliso Viejo.

Half of the building will be dedicated to displays. Unlike older museums, the Orange County facility will use the latest in a growing technique called “interpretive display.”

Instead of loading the museum shelves and cabinets with thousands of esoteric artifacts, Varner said, the staff will set up displays that will explain the importance of the artifacts and their relation to one another.

“We will set up the museum in a way that is going to be exciting and entertaining,” Varner said of his proposed hands-on approach to displaying and teaching. “We don’t want to be a ‘stuffed animal’ museum or have exhibits that people merely walk past.”

In addition to the display area in Laguna Niguel, Varner said, the foundation is planning three satellite museums. The most likely spots for those facilities include the UCI Arboretum on campus, O’Neill Regional Park in Trabuco Canyon and the end of the Huntington Beach Pier.

About half of the main facility will be dedicated to laboratory and storage space, two aspects of a museum that are as vital to its success as the viewing area.

The public and science are suffering, Varner said, because of the lack of adequate research space.

At present there are at least three complete whale skeletons encased in diatomaceous earth and plaster of Paris in a parking lot of the foundation’s warehouse in Santa Ana. Researchers have yet to begin work uncovering the paleontological treasures.

The whale skeletons are just one example of the tons of artifacts that are locked away from the public eye. Countless cartons of bones, teeth, bowls, shells, arrowheads and other artifacts have yet to be catalogued, Varner said.

And as residential and commercial construction continues in artifact-rich South County, many more are likely to be found.

“The warehouse in Santa Ana is full to overflowing right now,” Varner said.

The artifact overcrowding is so severe, in fact, that private developers, who are required to turn over all finds to the county, have been forced to stockpile them until the county can take control.

At the Newport Coast project in Corona del Mar, for instance, the Irvine Co. has filled a fleet of boxcar-size storage bins with artifacts from the once-ubiquitous Gabrieleno Indian tribe, whose members camped in the hilly coastal country around Newport Beach.

The company is eager to turn the artifacts over, Varner said, but the foundation has no storage space left. Foundation members have asked the county to study ways to launch a joint public-private venture to help speed along the plan for a permanent museum.

Orange County Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, whose district includes the Laguna Niguel site, said the board has commissioned a study on the feasibility of a public-private project.

But, he cautioned, despite the lofty goal of the foundation members to provide the public with a valuable recreational and educational institution, the county is not prepared to foot the bill for construction.

“I don’t know of anybody in the county who isn’t supportive of a museum,” said Riley, pointing out that the county has donated the 25 acres of undeveloped land for the permanent site.

“But the county can only do so much. Right now, the financing is going to have to be found someplace else.”

Riley’s chief aide, Ken Bruner, added, however, that some funds may be found in several departments, including Harbors, Beaches and Parks.

“It’s appropriate to do. It’s intellectually sound and it’s doable financially,” Bruner said.

Lawrence G. Barnes, a member of the Los Angeles County Natural History and Science Museum, urged the county to not only provide funds for construction, but to organize a county museum department.

“They (Orange County Board of Supervisors) have to put their money where their mouth is,” Barnes said, adding that he feels the museum should be much larger that the planned 100,000-square-foot facility.

The foundation, established in 1974 by a group of Newport Beach women, operates a natural-history museum out of a 7,000-square-foot room at an abandoned Newport Beach elementary school.

A few partitions are set up to separate paleontological from archeological exhibits, but the room is so cramped that the museum becomes chaotic when more than a couple of classes of schoolchildren attend field trips.

The foundation, however, is on the brink of announcing that it will move the small museum to a 40,000-square-foot site by the summer.

But even that will not be nearly large enough to hold all the prehistoric treasures and the growing number of scientific exhibits the museum is collecting, Varner said.

The largest scientific exhibit will be a mock-up of a space station that will eventually be shot into space. The wood and metal laboratory, large enough for museum visitors to walk through, is in storage at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.

“If you don’t have a real good-sized museum, people don’t want to come back,” Varner said. “They will feel like they didn’t experience a destination point.”

Sites in Costa Mesa, Santa Ana and Aliso Viejo--a mile from the permanent site--are being considered, Varner said.

Meanwhile, the foundation is doing what it can to spark public interest in the project so that it can raise money for construction and endowment funds. A few weeks ago, with the help of the Santa Margarita Co., the foundation sponsored a Nature Affair, which raised about $25,000. Other fund-raisers are planned.

Varner said one of his favorite pastimes these days is to stand on the grassy ridge overlooking the museum site and picture the glass and concrete building, the garden next to a meandering creek and the picnic area that surrounds the parking lot.

“This is something the people of Orange County need,” Varner said, “to fulfill their educational, intellectual and recreational interests.”