While stationed at the University Cook's Gap Field Station, he had constructed a neutrino detector which he located in one of the deeper disused underground galleries of the Ulan coal mine, near Mudgee, Australia.
Dr Beanie filled the neutrino detector's elliptical tank with super chilled liquid Carbon Tetrachloride (Tetrachloromethane – CCl4), and focussed the detector on the LMC these last six months hoping to see if any lower frequency of detection indicated any variation in output between galaxies.
Dr Beanie had been monitoring the tank with a sophisticated ground-penetrating radar of his own design and to his great surprise discovered something totally unexpected when a small percentage of particles passing through proved to have greater structural similarity to photons than to neutrinos.
Examination of the radar signatures with a powerful electron microscope adjusted to the same phase showed structured photons linked in joint fashion similar to the phytons in a flowering plant.
Dr Beanie has named these particles “Fotophytons” and is now concerned to establish just how photonic type particles can penetrate 100 metres of hard rock.
Preliminary computer modelling using a veteran Unix machine suggests that the semi lattice like structure of fotophytons stops them being absorbed or deflected by impact but instead imparts spin as one part of the lattice encounters an intervening atom so that the whole fotophyton rotates rapidly and bounces it's way through the matrix beneath, with a new rotative spin on each impact.
This finding has caused great excitement amongst astronomers seeking to uncover the secrets in the hubs of galaxies and dark matter, as such particles could penetrate the intervening gas and dust clouds that have for so long obscured our vision of these remote places.
Research assistants at the University are now busy trying to construct a fotophyton camera which has a special filter built in to exclude all other particles and is sensitive only to these new objects.
Film is out owing to reciprocity problems as each “photo” would take about two years of exposure before enough particles turned up to be imaged, and in this regard the LMC makes a fine target as being circumpolar exposure can be kept up for 24 hours a day seven days a week, even during daylight hours as the camera is not sensitive to normal photons.
A phase-modulated CCD chip with harmonic variance capability and congruent molecularity so that the impact and even glancing hits can be recorded on DVD seems the best bet.
The University of Bürgerweldt plans to construct a similar camera and locate it at Baron Beavis von Büttkopf's Schlöss Ratzhärz Observatory to image the core of M31.
While passing the mullock heaps from surface excavations at the Ulan mines Dr Beanie's attention was drawn to a large quantity of old bones which had been excavated by the miners from surface diggings and casually discarded by them in the belief that they were residue from the long defunct Ulan abattoir.
His trained eye noted some unusual features amongst the bones, and closer examination confirmed that they were not bovine in origin but actually the complete skeletons of a small herd of Alpacasaurus, a dinosaur species thought to have become extinct at the end of the Cretaceous along with the rest of the genus.
Thinking scientists now concede that it is highly unlikely that at a time when 70% of life forms on Earth had become extinct, 100% of dinosaur species had got the chop, and considering that they had occupied a wide range of habitats over 150 million years some at least should have survived.
It is now considered that the smaller feathered dinosaurs, equipped both for mobility and insulation kicked on to become the ancestors of birds.
However, the freaky thing about the Ulan Alpacasaurus (alpacasaurus beanii) is that the bones were not only non-fossilised but were carbon dated to a mere 20,000 years old.
Cut marks on many bones suggest that the animals were expertly butchered with stone knives and that their eventual extinction in Australia was probably caused by over-hunting.
How they survived when their northern cousins had not may be explained by the fact that in the late Cretaceous, the Australian land mass was near the Antarctic Circle, and dinosaur species had adapted over millions of years to cope with three or more months of darkness while the sun was below the horizon in winter.
Thus, the “nuclear” winter which had done in the northern hemisphere dinosaurs had less effect on a species better adapted to cope with the new conditions.
A search is now underway for dinosaur remains in late Tertiary deposits throughout Australia, places which had in the past been ignored by dinosaur hunters.
A herbivore about as big as a small horse, and in the case of the southern species, finely feathered, Alpacasaurus has written a new chapter in Palaeontology.