Boxes of Tossed-Out Fossils Were Not Labeled, School Official Says : Paleontology: ‘The workers involved feel horrible,’ Supt. Bernd says. Water district spokeswoman contends materials were marked.

Cleaning crews accidentally threw out hundreds of prehistoric fossils stored at a Newport Beach school because the boxes were not clearly labeled or kept behind locked doors, Newport-Mesa Unified School District officials said Wednesday.

The fossils included the skull of an extinct horse and bison bones collected during the excavation of a reservoir in east Costa Mesa and stored temporarily at the closed Lindbergh Elementary School by the Mesa Consolidated Water District.

“Obviously, we’re extremely sorry that this happened, and the workers involved feel horrible about it,” said Newport-Mesa Supt. Mac Bernd. But the 15 boxes “appeared to be full of rocks and different things. There was no indication that they were sensitive at all.”

Water district officials countered: “Every box is labeled, and as you lift the lid, there is an inventory which says what examples of that fossil are there. . . . We disagree that they would have the appearance of trash,” said Mary Urashima, water district spokeswoman. Also discarded by cleaning crews were a few large items--such as a 200-pound horse skull--that were not boxed but wrapped in special paper, she said.

Tuesday, water district officials announced that school workers had tossed more than half of the 3,000-specimen collection into trash Dumpsters in July, although the loss was not discovered until Aug. 31.

The fossils are believed to be buried at Frank R. Bowerman Landfill in Irvine. School and water district officials said they made no recovery attempts because such an effort would be futile. Each day, 4,500 tons of waste are dumped at the landfill and then bulldozed, leading the officials to believe that the fossils have been crushed.

The collection included 87 mammal, marine and plant specimens from the Pleistocene Era, ranging from 2 million to 10,000 years ago. Among the items were rare well-preserved pine cones and a sand formation embedded with fossilized seashells.

Paleontologists hired by the water district for $90,000 had stored fossils at the school site since late 1992. In July, school district officials told the water district that work crews would be cleaning all classrooms, Bernd said. Cleaning crews assumed that any valuables would be kept in the paleontologists’ two locked rooms, for which the maintenance staff does not have keys, he said.

But water district officials contend the doors were locked, and that they were not warned about the cleaning crews.

Paleontologists often keep fossils from the field in boxes until the material can be catalogued and properly stored, said Samuel McLeod, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, which had just started to review the items.

“I can’t see where I fault anyone for this,” he said.

The collection included “very fine materials” in good condition that would have told paleontologists much about the animals and environment of prehistoric Southern California, McLeod said.

Water district officials said they could not assign a dollar figure to the loss. They will continue work on the remaining collection, preparing items for display at an undetermined site, Urashima said.

“Clearly, this was not done intentionally, and we don’t want to begin finger pointing,” she said. “We want to focus on what can be done with what remains. We are very saddened by the loss.”