LAGUNA NIGUEL : Natural History Museum Forced to Seek New Home

It might not have been the most likely location for a natural history museum, but at least the Plaza de la Paz shopping center was home. And it was free.

However, the Orange County Natural History Museum recently received what amounted to an eviction notice and now museum officials have six months to find a new benefactor willing to let them have space for little or no cost.

“We do feel badly about having to move,” said museum board member Jackie Hanson. “We’ve just gotten to the point where people know we’re here.”

The museum had been allowed to use 1,200 square feet in the plaza by owner Howard Adler Management. However, the shopping center was sold recently and the new owner declined to let the museum stay rent-free. The museum has until April 30 to move.

“We have to find somebody who is charitably inclined,” said Hanson. “We don’t have the funding to be able to pay for another place.”

And that would be a tragedy for thousands of schoolchildren who have used the shopping center museum during the three years, said paleontologist Ed Marks, who teaches a micro-paleontology class to children at the museum.

“It’s important for people to know where they came from,” said Marks. “Why do we have art museums? To give us an understanding of our day in time.

“Fossils tell us about the culture of the past. A child can come into our museum and touch the whale bone of a creature he never knew existed before.”

Since opening in a vacant Newport Beach school 10 years ago, the museum has been as nomadic as its fossilized creatures that once roamed Orange County.

It was all hope and dreams in 1990, when museum officials signed a seven-year lease to rent a 32,000-square-foot building in Aliso Viejo. Finally, they had the space to display the racks of fossil bones that sat gathering dust in warehouses.

But, the museum closed in less than six months, with officials blaming the recession and the Gulf War with sabotaging daily attendance, which slipped from 1,500 visitors to less than 200 people shortly after opening.

After shutting down, the museum went into hibernation until Adler stepped forward to offer the use of space in the Plaza de la Paz shopping center.

The museum is also the administrator of thousands of fossils found throughout Orange County.