Down to the Bone

Placed carefully on the floor of a Quonset hut near a future toll road in southern Orange County, the 6-foot tusk of a prehistoric mammoth lies gleaming on its side.

There are fossils of scallops and the remains of a duck-billed dinosaur. Piled high on a tarp outside, an ancient whale’s bones are mixed with the teeth of the dozens of sharks that might have eaten it. And nearby, a pile of fossilized logs speaks of a prehistoric Southern California once covered by avocado-like trees that were 60 feet high.

“Projects like this don’t come along very often,” said Mark Roeder, a paleontologist monitoring construction of the Eastern Transportation Corridor, where 30,000 prehistoric specimens have been found since 1995.

Sparked by a series of massive development projects coupled with an aggressive county policy to protect what the bulldozers uncover, these and other finds have marked Orange County in recent years as a significant paleontological site. In breadth and importance, some scientists say, the area rivals the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. But the amount of digging has also created a problem for would-be researchers: where to put the stuff in a county without a major natural history museum.

“In Orange County, everyone wants you to pick it up, but there’s no place to put it down,” said Lawrence Barnes, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and author of numerous articles on Orange County’s bones.

Barnes’ concerns were shared by Orange County officials who, in 1977, enacted a model paleontological protection policy that has been copied nationwide. Under the policy, developers are required to have construction sites monitored by paleontologists with the authority to temporarily halt work to recover fossils and bones.

“The developer is required to protect the specimens and offer them to the county,” said Tim Miller, manager of the county’s Harbors, Beaches and Parks department, which oversees the program. “The county can then either store them or give them to somebody else.”

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The lack of exhibition space is a result of the explosion in recent years of paleontological discoveries in Orange County.

More than 10,000 bones were uncovered during construction of the San Joaquin Hills Transportation Corridor, the toll road connecting Newport Beach and San Juan Capistrano that was completed last year. More recently, treasures of fossilized remains have been found in Irvine and Newport Beach. And as many as 30,000 bones and fossils recovered so far during grading of the Eastern Transportation Corridor sit in boxes and on shelves awaiting a final destination in that cramped Quonset hut near the construction zone.

Until recently, the bones would have been stored in a 10,000-square-foot warehouse the county maintains for the purpose in Santa Ana. Four years ago, however, the warehouse reached capacity with about half a million specimens. And, except for an interpretive center at Ralph B. Clark Regional Park, a small, private museum in San Juan Capistrano and a handful of modest centers elsewhere, the county has no other natural history facility.

“In just about every project, the fossils are being stored by the individual firms that did the work,” said Steve Conkling, a paleontologist and president of the Natural History Assn. of Orange County, which operates the museum in San Juan Capistrano.

A private group opened a large museum in Mission Viejo in 1991, he said, but had to close it within six months due to the recession and a bad location. “We are all nearing capacity at our storage facilities,” Conkling said. “What has to happen is that someplace in Orange County that can accept collections has to be found.”

Miller could be part of the solution.

County officials under his direction recently added a wing to the paleontology warehouse that will increase its size by 600 square feet. A $350,000 federal grant will be used either to improve existing facilities or to build new ones. Miller’s office is preparing a proposal that if adopted by the Board of Supervisors would help keep the bones in Orange County.

“Just storing them really doesn’t benefit anybody,” he said. “Ultimately, our goal is to have the specimens out on exhibit so the public can enjoy them.”

Under Miller’s plan, the county would charge developers for storing, cataloging and exhibiting fossils and bones found at construction sites. The Natural History Assn. of Orange County would oversee the work. The specimens would be exhibited at nine county parks with an eye toward creating a central museum, perhaps in a blimp hangar at the Tustin Marine Corps Helicopter Air Station.

“You have to ask the question of when to stop creating warehouses.” Miller said. “To just continually store materials isn’t benefiting anyone.”

County supervisors are expected to consider the matter by year’s end.

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Back along the Eastern Transportation Corridor, meanwhile, the fossils and bones keep piling up. Following closely behind the scrapers and bulldozers, monitors wearing hard hats and bright orange vests spend about 10 hours a day peering intently at the ground. When something potentially significant is found, they rope off the area. While common specimens are left in the ground, anything unusual is quickly removed.

“Anything you can think of, we probably have a fossil,” Roeder said.

Among the specimens recovered so far are the remains of prehistoric camels, sea lions, whales and other animals ranging from 10,000 to 75 million years old.

Conkling has a description for what’s going on. “The history of Orange County,” he says, “is being rewritten by paleontologists.”

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Fossil Road

Of the thousands of bones uncovered while constructing the county’s Eastern Transportation Corridor, a dozen types of fossils have been clearly identified. They date back as far back as 75 million years; some are as recent as 10,000 years. A look at these paleontological discoveries:

1. Mammoth

Size: 12-13 feet at shoulders; 6-7 tons

Range: Canada to Mexico

Age of Find: Late Pleistocene, over 10,000 years old

Fossils: Tusks, thigh bone, vertebrae and ribs

2. Horse

Size: 4 1/2 feet tall; 1,500 pounds

Range: Canada to Mexico

Age of Find: Late Pleistocene, over 10,000 years old

Fossils: Skull and pelvis

3. Sand Dollar

Size: 1-2 inches

Range: Northeastern Pacific Ocean

Age of Find: Miocene, 20 million years old

Fossils: Shells

4. Scallop

Size: 4-8 inches; 1-2 pounds

Range: Northeastern Pacific Ocean

Age of Find: Middle Miocene, over 16 million years old

5. Black Bear

Size: 6-7 feet; 300-600 pounds

Range: Canada to Mexico

Age of Find: Late Pleistocene, over 10,000 years old

Fossils: Skull

6. Duck-Billed Dinosaur

Size: 10-15 feet tall; 3-4 tons

Range: Mainly western North America

Age of Find: Late Cretaceous, 75 million years old

Fossils: Neck vertebrae, toe bone

7. Baleen Whale

Size: 35-80 feet long

Range: Worldwide

Age of find: Late Miocene, 10 to 12 million years old

Fossils: Skull and jaws

8. Leaves

Size: 2-8 inches

Age of find: Middle Eocene, 45 million years old

Fossils: Leaf impressions representing at least eight kinds of trees

9. Desmostylus (Marine Hippo-Like Animal)

Size: 7-10 feet tall; 3 tons

Range: Fossils found in western North America and Japan

Age of Find: 28 to 10 million years old

Fossils: Skeleton, skull, jaws and teeth

10. Giant Great White Shark

Length: Up to 42 feet long

Range: Worldwide

Age of Find: Late Miocene, 10 to 12 million years old

Fossils: Large tooth

11. Dog-Like Carnivore

Size: 2 feet tall; 20-30 pounds

Range: North America

Age of Find: Miocene, 18 to 20 years old

Fossils: Skeleton, skull and jaws

12. Camel

Size: 3-4 feet; 50-100 pounds

Range: North America

Age of Find: Unknown

Fossils: Skeletons

Finding Fossils

As bulldozers cut through the Santa Ana foothills to build the corridor, paleontologists are finding bones from 12 separate layers of time, including the Jurassic Age. The reason the bones have risen to the surface is explained in the movement of Earth’s surface:

1. As Earth’s plates shift, forming the Santa Ana Mountains, bones buried for millions of years are pushed to the surface.

2. Layers remain intact, but angled, along the base of the mountains.

Source: Paleo-Environmental Associates Inc.; Researched by APRIL JACKSON / Los Angeles Times