A crew cutting the foundation of a Georgia nuclear plant hit bone 30 feet down, and the animal they had opened turned out to be a whale that could not yet swim with its tail

Red clay, a hundred miles from the nearest ocean, in the spring of 1983.

A crew is cutting the foundation for a reactor in Burke County, and the bucket keeps coming up with pale limestone.

In the limestone are long curved bones.

Propulsion came from the hind legs and from undulating the body and hips, which is closer to an otter than to anything alive in the ocean now.

Nobody on the crew knows what they are, and the schedule does not stop.

What is in that trench has been there for forty million years.

It is a whale, and it is ninety three miles from the sea.

How a foundation trench reaches a seafloor that is gone

The animal is not out of place. The coastline is.

During the middle Eocene a warm shallow sea covered the southeastern corner of the continent, reaching far inland of where the Atlantic sits today.

What settled on that seabed hardened into a band of marine sediment now called the Blue Bluff unit, and the land rose and the water pulled back east.

That old seafloor is still there. It is simply underneath everything, and nothing that happens at the surface goes near it.

A reactor is one of the few structures that does. Its foundation has to reach undisturbed load bearing ground, and at this site that meant cutting about 30 feet down.

Thirty feet was enough to open a seabed that had not seen daylight since the Eocene, which is why the find belongs to the construction rather than any survey.

What was lying in the cut

The main skeleton came out of a patch of ground roughly eleven feet square.

It ran to about 60 separate bones and teeth from one adult, an estimated 75 to 80 percent of the animal, including a nearly complete skull, both jaws, more than twenty vertebrae, ribs and both hip bones.

The skull alone runs past 30 inches. Two more individuals turned up nearby, each represented by a handful of vertebrae and ribs.

The hip bones are the part that matters. They are well developed, with proper sockets, so this animal still had substantial hind legs.

What they are not is attached. The pelvis had come away from the spine, and a pelvis that is not anchored to the backbone cannot carry a body’s weight on land.

So the legs were real and the beach was already closed. That combination is the whole point of the animal.

Eleven days, and what the description said

Paleontologists told the plant they needed three days. The recovery took eleven, jacketing the blocks in plaster and lifting them out.

The species was described in 1998, in a paleontology journal, by a team led from a Georgia university.

They named it for where it came from, a Georgia whale from Plant Vogtle, which put a power station permanently into the scientific name of an animal 40 million years old.

The sediments date to the Bartonian stage of the middle Eocene, roughly 40 million years ago.

The fossils and a reconstruction are held at a university museum in Statesboro, with the hip bones on display.

A later analysis placed the genus at the base of the group containing every fully aquatic whale, which is why it gets described as sitting at the hinge of the story.

What this animal could not do

It could not swim the way a whale swims.

The tail vertebrae carry flanges that do not belong on an animal with a fluke, and the description is explicit that it lacked one.

Propulsion came from the hind legs and from undulating the body and hips, which is closer to an otter than to anything alive in the ocean now.

The fluke came later, in animals descended from this stage, and that is the single most interesting thing about the fossil. It is the step before the tail.

Its length is also not settled. Estimates run from about 10 to 20 feet, because the tail and the legs were never found and a body cannot be measured from a skull.

The published account is careful about that, and the shorter figures that circulate are the low end of a range rather than a measurement.

What an excavation can and cannot do for science

Outside of mining, almost nothing but a nuclear plant foundation digs 30 feet into undisturbed marine sediment across acres of ground.

No research budget funds that. A hand dug trench would rarely expose the right layer, and would almost never expose enough of it to hit scattered bone.

So industrial excavation finds things, and then industrial pace decides how much of them survives.

Eleven days was borrowed time. Whatever lay outside the ground the team could jacket in that window went out with the spoil, and the record is clear about that limit.

The relevant part for anyone building now is that the Blue Bluff unit runs well beyond the reactor footprint, so the next trench through it is a coin toss rather than a survey.

With more than 110 reactors planned worldwide and designs that put units down a borehole, a great deal of old ground is about to be opened by people looking for bedrock.