Paleontology: The Monster in the Accelerator

The two-mile tunnel that slices through the rolling countryside behind Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., was built for one purpose only: to house a linear accelerator with a beam of 20-billion-volt electrons that might knock stubborn secrets out of atomic nuclei. The accelerator is not yet complete, but its construction has already led to a striking discovery in the unexpected field of paleontology. A bulldozer digging a trench at the end of the tunnel veered a few feet from its guideline and uncovered a ponderous and peculiar skeleton.

Paleontologist Earl Packard, professor emeritus of Oregon State College, who now lives in Palo Alto, was called in to identify the ancient bones. He knew at once that he was looking at something special. "I've waited 40 years for a find like this," he said.

The perfectly fossilized bones are remains of Paleoparadoxia ("Ancient contradiction"), an amphibious mammal bigger than a rhinoceros that wallowed in the shallows 15 to 20 million years ago when California's Coast Ranges had not yet risen and the site of inland Palo Alto was still under the sea. Paleoparadoxia belongs to a long-extinct order, the desmostylians, which lived the lives of saltwater hippopotamuses around the shores of the North Pacific. It was first found in Japan, but the Palo Alto skeleton is the only one found in North America.

The Palo Alto specimen probably died nonviolently, then its body sank to the ocean floor. A few shark teeth were found among the bones, suggesting that sharks may have had a few bites of paradoxia's plentiful flesh before a storm or flood covered the body with sand. Then sediment from the sierras covered it deeply, and a mountain range pushed upward between its grave and the ocean. At last big-brained primates, which had not evolved during its lifetime, brought it into the sunlight while searching for the secrets of infinitesimal matter.