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When the San Mateo County History Museum finishes a remodel and expansion in mid-2026, one of the most interesting items that will go on display will be a plaster cast of a sea mammal that last swam in the county 14 million years ago.
The cast is a reconstruction of actual fossilized bones that were found in 1964 by construction workers excavating the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park
The original bones are now stored at the campus of University of California, Berkeley.
Understanding the animal became a lifelong interest of Adele Panofsky, a Los Altos Hills mother of five who died last year at age 100. Panofsky’s husband, Pief, was a renowned physicist and director of the research center from 1961 to 1984.
Adele Panofsky pieced together the plaster bones into a skeleton, spending over 20 years on the restoration project. She was self-taught, looking at other bones and visiting museums, according to her daughter Carol Panofsky of Santa Cruz.
From 1996 to 2014, the plaster bones were displayed at the center, which focuses on physics and has been the site of several Nobel Prize-winning discoveries. Tour guides at SLAC, as it is known today, refer to the fossils as being the lab’s first discovery.
The name of the primeval creature has changed over the years. Originally known as Paleoparadoxia, it is now called Neoparadoxia repenningi in honor of paleontologist Charles Repenning, who identified the mammal when it was found at the lab site.
The animal is described as a sea cow or a hippo with frog legs and it lived in an era when most of the Peninsula was under water.
There’s much that scientists don’t understand about the fossil, said Dana Neitzel, curator of the San Mateo County Historical Association, which runs the museum out of the county’s restored 1910 courthouse.
“It’s a weird critter, only (found) in the Pacific,” she said. “That’s why it’s a paradox.”
For those who wonder if this might be a dinosaur, Neitzel said that dinosaurs lived in a different era (66 million years ago by one account) and have never been found in California.
Serendipity brought the sea mammal to the Redwood City-based museum. SLAC officials had been trying to figure out what to do with their skeleton after the building it was displayed in was torn down, when they heard from officials at the history museum.
The fossil will be part of a natural history gallery expected to open in the summer of 2026, said Mitch Postel, president of the San Mateo County Historical Association. Neoparadoxia repenningi will join several other fossils on display.
“It will probably be the most impressive piece we’re showing,” he said.
The replica bones are currently in storage, awaiting the installation, said Postel.
Carol Panofsky said her mother became obsessed with learning about the fossil and re-creating it. Although the fossil was missing its head, “It was an amazing find because it was so complete,” she said.
Fossils of similar animals were discovered near Santa Barbara and in Japan, which provided clues for the reconstruction.
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