Building Boom Yields Fossil Riches

The sun beats down on a pair of unremarkable warehouses behind an abandoned county records building in Santa Ana as John D. Cooper parks his pickup. A freight train rumbles by, horn blaring, and the dull clunk of tumbling metal echoes from a scrap yard a hundred yards away.

The industrial setting hardly seems the place for an emeritus professor of geology to spend his time in retirement. Nor would the warehouses seem like the final resting place for prehistoric creatures that swam the waters blanketing much of Southern California millions of years ago.

Yet it’s here that Cooper, an academic-turned-caretaker of antiquities, watches over a scattered collection of fossils unearthed over the last three decades from construction sites around Orange County.

With nowhere to permanently display the fossils and only the help of a few volunteers to sort through the finds -- some still sealed in their original plaster casings, others stored outdoors due to lack of space -- Cooper has his hands full.

“The county arguably is in the possession of the largest raw collection of fossils on the planet,” said Cooper, 66, a retired geology professor who has managed the collection since 1999. “Not just the West Coast, not just the United States, not just North America, but the world.”

Lawrence G. Barnes, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, agrees.

“They have one of the major collections of fossils in the world,” he said of Orange County.

And though Cooper arranges for some of the fossils to be lent out for display in exhibits or studied by researchers, most of them -- remains as tiny as the teeth of prehistoric rodents and as massive as the spinal column of a whale -- remain stacked and shelved in 20,000 square feet of storage space. The items share the property with an equally out-of-place collection of World War II-era military vehicles.

In 1978, county supervisors set aside the warehouses for storage of fossils and Native American artifacts unearthed during construction projects that had been approved by the county.

If the county suspects something unusual may be buried in the ground where grading or construction is slated to occur, the county-issued grading permit specifies how discoveries should be treated, said Marlene Brajdic, a historical-resources planner for the county.

Cities issue their own permits and typically have similar provisions to manage cultural resources, Brajdic said, though some cities turn over their discoveries to the county. Some cities, such as Newport Beach, Mission Viejo and Laguna Hills, have their own smaller fossil collections.

When fossils are discovered, they are jacketed -- wrapped in a soup of plaster and burlap that hardens into a chalky white casing -- for transport to the warehouses. For years, though, there was no consistent system for cleaning, stabilizing, cataloging and classifying the fossils.

By the early 1990s, the construction boom had yielded such a bounty of artifacts and fossils that the county started turning them away. Until Cooper and a team of other scientists and volunteers took over managing the county’s storage areas, most of the excess items were stored with private companies, mostly developers and construction firms.

In 1999, when the county contracted with Cal State Fullerton to conceive and implement a curating system for the collection, Cooper and Phyllisa Eisentraut, then an assistant professor of anthropology at the college, found it in disarray.

“Aisles had boxes piled up and other boxes had water damage,” Cooper said. Some of the boxes held valuable fossils, while others contained little more than rubble, often just river rock.

The inventory system was so ragged that Cooper and the rest of the staff had little idea of what had been collected over the years.

Working with $400,000 in federal grants and money from the county parks budget -- a revenue source that ran out last year -- Cooper and the volunteers were able to catalog much of the collection, which he estimates at 500,000 to 1 million pieces, and implement basic curating procedures.

They also made more than a few unexpected finds.

One was the skull of an aquatic carnivore that Cooper said might be a previously unknown relative of the modern walrus that lived 8 million to 10 million years ago.

A volunteer discovered the skull last summer in a plaster casing of fossils unearthed in the southern end of the county in 1986. The description said the plaster jacket contained whale remains. Cooper thinks those who originally jacketed the chunk of ground in which the skull was found were unaware of it.

“This was a case of serendipity,” he said, “but it’ll happen again.” He said at least 200 jackets remain unopened.

Most of the fossils unearthed in the county, he said, are mammals from the Miocene Epoch, a period in geologic history that spanned from 25 million years ago to 5 million years ago, when much of Southern California was underwater.

Though land animals such as mammoths and ancient relatives of bison, rhinos and camels occasionally turn up, the bulk of the collection consists of marine mammals.

Last year, construction crews in Newport Beach discovered part of a whale skull under the home of a couple who were adding a wine cellar in their basement.

By the time they dug more extensively around the fossil, paleontologists suspected that the bone might be from a previously unknown species of the family Balaenidae, commonly known as right whales.

“It’s among the nicest fossil whale skulls I’ve seen in Orange County,” said Barnes, a specialist in marine mammals who has studied thousands of whale fossils in Southern California over the last few decades. “It’s at least in the top five.”

Barnes said he has lobbied Orange County supervisors for a county natural history museum. “Otherwise stuff will languish.”

One campaign to establish a museum in 1992 fell apart when the Natural History Foundation of Orange County, the nonprofit group raising money for the effort, went bankrupt.

“The Board of Supervisors has said several times they’re totally supportive of the idea of having a natural history museum,” said Rob Selway, director of the Orange County Historical Commission, the county arm that oversees the collection. “There are some people who want the county to spend millions, and the county has not seen it to be appropriate.”

But a museum may yet be on the horizon.

Cal State Fullerton plans to propose a five-year agreement with the county in which the university would raise money through private donations and grants to establish a museum on its campus.

Though he declined to talk specifically on the details of the plan, Vice President for Academic Affairs Ephraim Smith said the university’s goal is a “learning museum” that would give students hands-on experience curating the collection and provide a venue for residents of the county to view it.

“The county should be proud of it,” Smith said of the collection, “as opposed to leaving it in a warehouse that no one sees.”

One county leader welcomes the university’s plan.

“I’m more than willing to support something like that,” Supervisor Bill Campbell said of lending or donating the county’s fossils and artifacts to Fullerton.

That the university plans to spearhead the fundraising effort, he added, makes its proposal more attractive.

“Having [a museum] jointly operate with a university creates a way that it can be self-sufficient,” Campbell said.

“If it was just under our Harbors, Beaches and Parks [division], it would be a resource drain, quite frankly,” he said.

Until a museum opens its doors, though, Cooper and about a dozen other volunteers will continue accepting fossils. “I’m trying to keep this operation afloat,” he said. Until recently, he added, the county seemed content to let the collection remain where it is.

But Cooper disagrees: “There’s too much rich stuff in there for that to happen.”