Scorpions and Petroglyphs and 2,000 White Elephants : Thrifts: Many seized S&L; properties cannot be sold due to scientific, environmental and other restrictions.

The Tooth Cave pseudo scorpion in Texas. Petroglyphs in New Mexico. Toxic wastes almost everywhere.

They are just some of the bizarre and vexing problems the federal government has inherited as part of its massive bailout of the savings and loan industry. And they are likely to become more numerous as more ailing thrifts fail.

The Resolution Trust Corp., the new federal agency that has taken on the assets of hundreds of failed S&Ls;, recently found to its horror that at least 2,000 of the properties it has seized cannot be sold on the open market.

The parcels are unsalable because of toxic hazards and myriad other scientific, environmental and historic restrictions on the land that troubled S&Ls; and shakily financed developers once dreamed of turning into shopping malls and suburban tract homes.

Those properties are in limbo, and federal officials are at a loss to figure out how they will get rid of them. In some instances, the agency may be forced to just give the land away and accept big writeoffs, despite its official mandate to sell its holdings for prices as close to market rates as possible.

“A huge cloud is hanging over these properties,” sighed Gary Bowen, RTC’s deputy director of asset and real estate management. “You can’t get a market price for them.”

Even worse, the regulators concede, there may be many more unmarketable odds and ends than anyone realizes in the government’s mushrooming portfolio of bottom-of-the-barrel real estate.

The RTC currently holds 37,000 properties from nearly 500 insolvent thrifts. Roughly 1,500 of those properties are listed as containing some form of endangered species or other valuable natural, historic or scientific asset. Another 400 have been identified as having some form of hazardous waste contamination.

Meanwhile, the RTC’s property list is growing faster than the government’s ability to inventory and identify the land, so more problem properties are likely to turn up.

“We don’t have any idea, really, what we have yet,” said Jim Davis, a senior asset-disposition specialist with the agency. “We are really just starting to get our hands on these. We may uncover a lot more.”

Some of the more extreme cases would be funny if they were not costing taxpayers so much money. Lawyers are certain to get rich trying to untangle the legal thickets entrapping the government in its role as unwitting landlord to the real estate industry’s ugliest orphans.

The RTC holds at least 7,000 acres of raw land in the hill country west of Austin, Tex., where several local S&Ls; had hoped to build single-family homes.

Now that land cannot be developed. The reason? It turns out the area is home to the Tooth Cave pseudo scorpion, plus at least four other small but rare cave-dwelling invertebrates. Wildlife specialists also have identified the region as the habitat of the golden-cheeked warbler, a small, insect-eating songbird placed on the government’s endangered species list last May.

As a result, tens of thousands of choice acres in the region, including the RTC’s properties, have been ruled off-limits for further development; they are now legally protected as an endangered species habitat.

The RTC is studying whether the seized properties can be sold or donated to a nonprofit wildlife conservancy group in the area. RTC officials are holding talks with the Fish and Wildlife Service in Washington to work out an agreement between the two agencies that might lead to a deal to give the land to a local organization.

But if the land is given away, the RTC will be forced to take a huge loss at a time when the agency is already facing the prospect of asking for billions of dollars more from Congress to cover the mounting costs of the S&L; cleanup.

Meanwhile, in New Mexico, the RTC is bedeviled by historic preservation rules. The agency owns 14 acres of valuable land outside Albuquerque that was to be developed into homes by an S&L; that has since gone belly up.

After the RTC took over the property, the federal government identified the land as the site of rare petroglyphs--prehistoric rock drawings dating back 2,000 years to some of the earliest Indian settlements in the Southwest.

In June, Congress created the Petroglyph National Monument, a park that encompasses much of the area surrounding the RTC’s properties. Now, Bowen of the RTC said, the only potential buyer is the National Park Service, which is not anxious to pay top dollar.

“We are looking for a way for them to donate the land to us, rather than sell it to us,” acknowledged Ernest Ortega, associate regional director for park operations for the National Park Service’s southwestern region.

With so much property at stake, Congress is starting to get involved in setting RTC policy on how to dispose of valuable land in environmentally sensitive areas. After it was discovered that the agency held land on the Outer Banks of North Carolina in a small area that is one of the world’s only maritime forests, Congress moved this fall to force the RTC to give conservation groups first crack at the property.

It remains unclear what will happen to the roughly 400 RTC-owned properties contaminated by hazardous wastes. In Conroe, Tex., outside Houston, for instance, the RTC took over an unfinished residential development of 12 lots. It turned out that the property was a former factory site where highly toxic creosote once was made.

The land has been turned over to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program for cleanup, but it is still not clear who will pay for the EPA’s work. One EPA official said the agency’s staff had proposed a change in the Superfund rules to exempt the RTC from liability for cleaning up land inherited from failed thrifts, but the regulation has not been approved. In the meantime, RTC and EPA officials are negotiating over what to do with the Conroe site.

For the RTC’s Davis, the worst thing about the whole land mess is that more bad property probably is headed for the agency’s books.

“There are more S&Ls; that are going to fail,” he warned. “And as we take over more institutions, we’re going to find more of these properties.”