Paleontology in Kansas
When sea levels were low the state was home to richly vegetated deltaic swamps where early amphibians and reptiles lived.
Later, during the Ice Age, glaciers briefly entered the state, which was home to camels, mammoths, mastodons, and saber-teeth.
[6] During the drier intervals Kansas was home to great coastal swamps with a rich flora included ferns and scale trees.
[8] Other fossils from this time period include Wakarusopus tracks left behind in Douglas County by a colossal amphibian that would have weighed several hundred pounds in life.
[13][14][15][16] Other dinosaurs endemic to Kansas include the hadrosauromorph Claosaurus,[17][18][19] and nodosaurs like Hierosaurus,[20] Silvisaurus,[21][22] and the previously mentioned Niobrarasaurus.
[25] During the Tertiary, specifically during the Miocene, Kansas was a savannah subjected to greater rainfall and a more moderate climate,[26][27][28][29][30] with fossilized crocodile remains being unearthed here as well as in the neighbouring states of Oklahoma and Nebraska.
[31] Fossils of Miocene era rhinos, mainly Teleoceras,[32] the giant camel Titanotylopus,[33][34][35] and tapirs have been unearthed in Kansas.
This contrasts with similar interpretations of mastodon fossils as the remains of giant buffalo from the mythic past told among the Delaware and Iroquois people in the eastern United States.
These eastern legends portrayed the destruction of the great buffalo as beneficial because the creature was a danger to humans and the wild game they depended on for food.
After West's discovery Charles H. Sternberg performed several years of fieldwork in the area, turning up hundreds of the fossiliferous nodules.
[2] In 1867 a United States Army surgeon named Dr. Theophilus Turner discovered a nearly complete plesiosaur skeleton in what is now Logan County while stationed at Fort Wallace.
Dr. Turner gave some of the vertebrae to a member of the Union Pacific railroad survey named John LeConte.
He in turn gave the bones to paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope, who identified them as the remains of a very large plesiosaur.
[44] Within two weeks of receiving the specimen, Cope made a presentation at the March 24th meeting of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.
[45] He named the creature Elasmosaurus platyurus, although in his hasty work he mistakenly reconstructed it with its head at the end of the tail instead of its neck.
They spent several days prospecting for fossils in modern Wallace and Logan Counties along the banks of the Smoky Hill River.
[50] In 1894, Othniel Charles Marsh erected the ichnogenus Limnopus for fossil footprints discovered in a Carboniferous-aged coal deposit.
The remains included a partial skull and jaws with fourteen teeth for which the new genus and species Erpetosuchus kansensis was erected.
[51] Early in 1962 reports of two beds rich in fossil insects newly discovered in Kansas and Oklahoma began circulating in science periodicals.
The pearl fossils have lost the shiny outer coating, or nacre, leaving them dull grey or brown in color.
[52] In spring 1952 an American Museum of Natural History team was performing field work with George Sternberg in Gove County.
A member of the AMNH team named Walter Sorenson discovered a fossil tail fin from the fish Xiphactinus audax eroding out of the rock.
[53] In 1956 western Kansas field paleontologist Marion Charles Bonner donated a nearly complete specimen of the short-necked plesiosaur Dolichorhynchops osborni to the Sternberg Museum of Natural History catalogued as FHSM VP-404.
