The sad history of the skull has been all but forgotten. A paper tag, brown and soft with age, gives the only clue to its story.

It shares a warehouse shelf with other hippo skulls – powerful, ponderous things, grimacing with teeth and tusks, the remains of bull males shot down on safari. But this skull is different. It’s smaller than the others, less imposing.

It comes from a hippo that lived and died in Orange County, whose last moments made headlines around the world. Today it is known only as specimen number 54113, just one of many hippo skeletons stored in this out-of-the-way warehouse.

But the paper tag makes clear that this hippo once had a name.

•••

She was a hippo on the lam, a two-ton Houdini. On a February night in 1978, Bubbles managed to burrow under her fence, squeeze past a barricade and lumber away from her pen at the old Lion Country Safari animal park in Irvine.

She found a marshy drainage pit and settled in for a standoff with park rangers, rarely showing much more than her nostrils above the water line. Crowds gathered. Television cameras arrived. Soon, even Johnny Carson was having a laugh at the wayward hippo in Orange County.

Bubbles emerged from her watery hideout a few days into her escape, and was greeted with a tranquilizer dart. She crumpled to the ground. Three rangers approached, and one tapped her with a wooden pole.

“Bubbles roused with a mighty snort,” the Register reported, “and promptly treed two rangers and sent the third scampering… Bubbles flicked her tail and rumbled back into the pond.”

For 19 days, Bubbles wallowed in her pond as news helicopters clattered overhead and highway patrol officers directed traffic on nearby roads. She refused to budge even when rangers baited a huge net with her favorite food, alfalfa.

And then, as night fell on her 19th day of freedom, Bubbles pulled herself out of the shallows and wandered up a nearby hill. A ranger approached her in the dark and shot her with two tranquilizer darts.

She staggered for a few more steps before her knees gave out and she collapsed. A veterinarian arrived and gave her a dose of a potent calming drug.

The cheering and backslapping of her capture soon turned to disbelief and then tears as the park rangers realized that Bubbles had stopped breathing. One of the rangers reached down and tried to close her eyes, then covered her body with a blanket.

The official story from Lion Country Safari has always been that Bubbles fell in an awkward position on the hill, and her heavy internal organs pressed against her lungs, suffocating her. But the lead ranger that night, Steve Clark, has long maintained that it was the veterinarian’s drug – administered needlessly and carelessly, he says – that killed Bubbles.

“She was only a hippo,” chided a cameraman as the crowd of reporters melted away that night.

“But to many, Bubbles was more than a hippo,” the Register wrote. “Some saw her as a symbol of the liberated lady and to others she provided comic relief from the day-to-day world crises.”

A heavy-duty earthmover carried Bubbles back to Lion Country Safari, where an autopsy found she had been pregnant with her second calf.

•••

But there’s a final chapter to her story, one that few people know, one that takes place a long way from her murky pond.

In a gray neighborhood of truck terminals and train tracks in the industrial city of Vernon stands a warehouse, unmarked except for the street number. It’s so mysterious that the manager of a wholesale emporium next door believes this is where the U.S. Marines conduct tests on fish.

Inside, the yellow light that filters down from the ceiling leaves shadows among the bones stacked along one wall and the white skulls that line the shelves. The air smells a little like old seashells and a lot like strong cheese.

This is Bubbles’ final resting place: Six drawers in a wooden cabinet marked “Hippopotamus Amphibius.” Here are her stout leg bones, each as dense and as heavy as a dumbbell. Here are her powerful shoulder blades, her massive ribs, even her black hooves.

Her skull – forty pounds of solid bone and tusk – sits on a metal shelf nearby, behind a tarp of thick plastic. It shares the shelf with three massive skulls from bull hippos sport-hunted decades ago in the wilds of Kenya.

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County uses this warehouse to store the animal skeletons and bones it doesn’t put on display. It has 98,000 specimens here, including the second-biggest collection of whales and other marine mammals in the world.

The warehouse is a library of bones, the back stacks of the museum. There are slender giraffe skulls arranged in a neat row on the shelf below Bubbles, and a rebuilt bison skeleton on the shelf above. There’s a blue whale skull on the floor nearby, as sleek as a speed boat and – at 18 feet – about as long.

Lion Country Safari donated Bubbles’ body to the museum for research, not to be pieced back together and put on display. She’s a rare celebrity here, but she’s not the only one: The warehouse also holds the remains of a circus polar bear, a performing killer whale and a celebrity chimp named Mike.

Museum files indicate that nobody has ever visited Bubbles here, with the possible exception of a paleontologist who may have borrowed her leg bones for research. “Some of (the specimens) might sit on the shelf for years and years and years,” says James Dines, the collections manager for the museum’s mammalogy department. “But when somebody needs it, it’s there.

A simple tag attached to Bubbles’ skull sums up her life in few words:

“Female (died with fetus). Born in captivity. California, Orange County, Laguna Hills, Lion Country Safari, Inc. Died 11 March 1978.”

But there’s another tag – brown and soft with age – attached to a box of teeth that have shaken loose over the years. On it, in black ink, someone thought to afford specimen number 54113 a rare dignity here. A name.

“This is ‘Bubbles.'”