[music] Hunting the chalk formations of western Kansas can yield a curious treasure, fossils of both aquatic and flying creatures that once inhabited the ancient western interior seaway.

[music] [music] The hunt in the western Kansas chalk beds has produced fossils that appear in museums around the world and is carried on today with people like Khristopher Super with the western Kansas Fossil Lab in Scott City.

Chris took Don Rolison into the field to both see what they might find and further excavate specimens he already identified.

So behind us there's a nice outcrop of the Smoky Hill chalk member which is part of the Nibrara Formation and what's interesting is that there are different fossils in different layers so if you're looking for a particular species of shark they may only occur at the very highest part of the formation or they may only occur at the lowest part.

So it's been over 150 years of exploration and there's still plenty of material to be found and recovered.

And new discoveries too.

I mean not only new discoveries of old things but-- But even new species.

New species are hiding out here somewhere.

Yeah.

This is what we're hoping to find today.

This is a really beautiful tooth from a mosasaur.

And mosasauras were these giant marine lizards that lived back here in the Cretaceous.

There were a wide variety of species and forms that came in.

This is one called Tylosaurus which is actually one of our state fossils.

This animal could grow beyond 30 feet in length.

And what did they usually eat?

Anything they could get their teeth around basically.

Mosasauras would eat other smaller mosasauras.

They would certainly eat plenty of fish, squid, birds, possibly even pterosaurs if they could catch one.

But basically if you're made of meat and the mosasaur gets it, you're going down.

The way those teeth are so strongly recurved that once you're hooked on those, the only way to get off is to go into the throat, you know.

Are you ready to go looking for some?

Yeah.

Let's go look around and take a walk in the park and see what we find.

So as much as it might-- You see a really good outcrop off the side of the road.

Can I just run in there and start looking for fossils?

That's not how it works, of course.

So in Kansas I believe it's 98% or even 99% of the land is privately owned.

So if you do want to go explore for your own fossils, it's key to get permission to be at the site first.

So many of these lighter little bits we're seeing are bits of a clam shell.

And the key for identifying those is in a cross section they've got these little kind of vertical lines.

I just call it the clam bar code.

So I just scan it, it's a clam, and I just toss it back most of the time.

[music] So we've only-- How far have we come since we started?

A hundred feet, not even?

Yeah.

And we've already found a vertebrate fossil.

See these sort of segments right here?

Mm-hmm.

Those are little fossil fish vertebrae, little backbones.

So this is probably one of the most abundant vertebrate fossils we find out here.

If you know the fossil in Hays, there's the fish within a fish, right?

Yes.

This is the one that's in the stomach of the bigger one.

This is an ichthyudectin fish called Hylicus.

Kind of a favorite snack of many of the other species.

Yeah, I'm wasting food here.

It's not necessarily the most important fossil, but we'll just go ahead and pop it out here and take a look at it.

So here you go.

Yes, there's a lot left.

Yeah, and this is, of course, rough in the field.

We could take it to the lab and prepare it if we really wanted to, but you can see one, two, three, four, about five or six vertebrae here.

Mm-hmm.

And then the tail rays, unfortunately, have been already lost to erosion.

Well, they're more fragile than the vertebrae.

Yeah, and the fish material is so flaky.

If you see, just by touching it here, I didn't apply any glue.

So this is what happens if you don't glue the fossils.

They tend to just-- you'll lose that surface.

Yeah.

Oh, guess what?

There's something right next-- we found another fossil right next to it.

Right here, there's a shark tooth.

A kritoxyrhyna is the species here.

I actually missed that.

I was focused on the silly fish, and I missed the-- Let's go ahead and pop that out.

There you go.

That's all you have to do most times.

Look at that.

Okay, people find a lot of sharks to eat.

Yes.

And they don't have any of them, and not the shark.

Well, yeah, that's a great question.

Most of the body of the shark is cartilage.

The teeth of the shark are hard.

They're enamel.

They tend to survive.

Sometimes you can find the vertebrae of the shark.

They're sort of partially ossified.

They have a little bit of bone in them.

But most of the entire body of the shark is cartilaginous.

So it just sort of decomposes.

But how cool is that that we found that right there?

And the shark teeth, there's a lot of them in the mouth of the shark.

Oh, yeah.

If you ever look at a jaw of a modern shark, I call it like a conveyor belt of teeth.

You know, there's often three, four, five rows.

They kind of form and roll forward.

And any time they're feeding on something, if that happens to be loose, it'll drop out.

Oh, there's another little shark's tooth.

So there's a lot of ways to do this.

When I was younger, I would just run like almost.

I would go really fast.

I just wanted to cover as much ground as possible.

That was my strategy then.

But I found as I've gotten older that sometimes when you know that this is a good horizon, a good layer, it might not be a bad idea to just stop and just kind of look, scan back and forth, scan back and forth.

There's our little sharky tooth right there.

So this is really quite a small tooth compared to the one we saw earlier.

This is Squeala Corax, which is probably the most abundant shark at this time.

What were the size of those?

I'm going to guess it's in the neighborhood of six to eight feet potentially.

I tend to wander all over.

I'll even go over the same ground twice.

Sometimes if you're sort of facing one direction, you might not notice something, but given that different perspective, you might see something you missed the first time.

It's a bit like gambling.

Sometimes you get by the car like we did, and boom, there's three or four fossils right there.

Other times you have a bad day maybe, you walk around.

You can walk for hours and only come across small fragments.

Like you said, even with almost two centuries of work out here, there's always new fossils eroding.

There's always new material reaching the surface.

Oh, I just found something nice.

There's a Mosasaur tooth just right here.

Oh, that's a nice one.

There you go.

So you're kind of a Mosasaur dentist, huh?

I suppose, yeah.

So the Mosasaur teeth are kind of round at the base.

They taper pretty sharply, and they're usually strongly curved like that.

So yeah, places like this where material-- there's other fossils sitting right here actually too.

You see how there's this sort of catchment or this little basin here.

Any material that erodes from there is likely to be caught down lower here.

So right there is another fish vertebra from a medium or kind of smaller sized fish.

The vertebrae from fish like Zefactinus, those vertebrae can be huge.

They can be as big as a coke can.

So this is a much smaller species.

Oh, and guess what?

There's another fossil right here.

Look at this.

So there's actually a shark tooth right here.

This is that same one we saw earlier, that Squeala Korax.

Here's a large fish tail here.

Yep, here's our fossil right here.

You can see these little segments in the tail.

And it's possible that goes somewhere.

That might be fun to actually dig on that one.

So when people find a complete fossilized skeleton or a lot of it, instead of them digging it up, they should probably contact a professional paleontologist.

Yeah, sometimes you do.

So it can be recorded.

You come across something where a lot of it's laid out.

And as we remember, we picked up that tail earlier and what happened to it, it crumbled in our hands.

So it does require a bit of a specialized hand to recover the significant fossil.

So yeah, if you're out in your pasture and you do happen to find something that looks potentially significant or looks partially or more complete, it probably would be a good idea to reach out to one of our local museums, whether that's us at the El Quartalejo Museum or the folks at the Sternberg Museum in Hays.

So I found one more little tooth here.

Right here is where I saw this little triangular point sticking out here.

So I saw about that much exposed there, right?

And now I've gone back a little further.

And this is going somewhere.

It continues.

This looks like a nice big shark's tooth.

Yeah.

This is really quite a gorgeous tooth.

Actually, you can tell I'm quite excited now.

That is really cool, actually.

That's a really good tooth.

That's super gold.

Yeah.

Hot dog.

That's awesome.

That's a really good one.

All right.

Let's pop this puppy out.

There you go.

That is a heck of a shark's tooth right there.

It is.

That's a good one.

That is a good one.

Look how shiny that is.

It's sharp too.

It's actually a nice sharp one.

There we go.

I'd say that's a good hunt this morning we did.

So last summer I spent time walking this whole thing from bit to bit of chalk.

Behind us I found a pretty interesting fossil.

And I didn't have time to collect it that day.

So what I'll do is I'll mark it with my GPS and I'll usually cover it.

And then when I have more time, I'll come back for it.

So this little pancake stack here are clam shell fragments that I use to cover where the bone is.

These were just sort of temporary protection for our fossil.

There you go.

So there is our bone right there.

So the first thing I'm going to do, I'm going to apply a little bit of glue to this exposed portion.

Just because it's always the most fragile is sort of the stuff right on the surface.

I did bring my generator and some of my power tools.

So basically we can take a bite out of this and then we'll follow that in and see where it goes.

I'm going to create a series of holes.

I'm going to probably make two or three lines of holes to sort of score the rock.

Then I'll take my larger, my paleo pick and I'll put it in those holes and sort of pop it and the rock will break nicely, hopefully, along that line of fracture there.

And you see how it just fractures it all right up for you.

I'm always trying to be mindful that my fossil is there, not to kick anything too big down on top.

When I get within, you know, six or eight inches, I switch to smaller hand tools and things.

So in this case, this is just a wood chisel, but it actually works pretty well here in the chalk.

I do try to brush pretty often while I'm working to just to keep a clean view of things.

Generally, the rule is the closer you get to the fossil, the smaller and smaller your tools tend to get.

We've taken an initial bite out of the overburden of the fossil here.

Our next goal is to actually follow the bones into the hill here and see if it may end just right there.

We might just have two bones and that might be the end.

I'm going to take my X-Acto knife and kind of outline the bone here a little bit.

So let's see where this is going.

Yeah, it just seems like a single bone by itself here.

It's hard to tell exactly which element it is.

It's definitely sort of an articular end here where it would meet with another bone, but past it, I don't see any more elements just yet.

The elements are important because they show the presence of what sort of an element.

Yeah, especially now we have a record of this species in this part of the formation.

Yeah, so now he's on a nice little pedestal there.

So there's the element that was exposed.

There's sort of an articular sort of a joint there.

When we get into the lab, we'll be able to say with more confidence which of the wing bones it is.

It's a little hard to say from here.

So this is just regular old aluminum foil.

That creates that sort of separation layer between the actual bone and the soon-to-be plaster jacket.

[Music] Yeah, so how about we let this sit and we can go prospect around another couple of areas.

And then by the time we're done playing around there, this should be ready and we can pop this out probably.

This actually feels pretty good.

I'm surprised by how quick that cured.

There you go.

And then just kind of flip her out.

Yeah, not much to it.

Unfortunately, it was just this one bone.

I'm excited to show you the prepared version of this when it's all cleaned up.

You'll be surprised.

You'll say, "Is that even the same bone?"

The goal in the field is not to make it look completely perfect and all clean.

The goal is just to figure out where it is and where it isn't.

A few months later, we joined Chris again at the Western Kansas Fossil Lab at the El Quartelejo Museum in Scott City to see the prepared fossil.

So we were up at our site there in Trigo County.

We had those pterosaur wing bones.

And just to remind our audience, a pterosaur is an ancient flying reptile.

Over a thousand have been found in Western Kansas.

And this is actually that same one that we went and collected up there in Trego County.

And since then, I've worked under the microscope with some small tools to pick away at that chalk matrix.

We've got one bone here that ends in a big sort of joint.

That is the distal end of the fourth metacarpal.

So sort of like one of your palm bones here.

Right about where the fingers would be.

It's the end of that bone.

And then you can see that it's connected to another bone there.

That would be the beginning of the bone that comes after that, which is more or less like our ring finger here.

Outside of our lab space here, we got a chance to see the exhibit that we made that has almost a complete wing.

In that case, we had the humerus, the radius and the ulna.

We had some of those metacarpals.

We even have the fingers and claws on that specimen, which is really exciting.

So, you know, you see this species, you see it in movies, TV shows, books, but all the original fossils are pretty much found out here in Western Kansas.

So this is a strange looking fossil.

What's this for?

Yeah, this is a giant clam shell.

Believe it or not, Western Kansas is famous for giant clams like this.

This is not even as large as they could get.

Here we're looking at the partially prepared skull of a Mosesaur called Platycarpus.

What makes this specimen so special is everything is perfectly articulated.

It is as it was in life.

One of the things that showed up this summer was part of a big fish called Xiphactinus.

What's exciting about the one that we're going to go check out is that we have a large portion of the skull of the fish.

Here's our artist's rendering of Xiphactinus.

Basically, the one that we're going to go visit, the very tip of the face is sticking out.

We're going to go see the lower jaws.

We're going to see the tip of both of the upper jaws.

And then at some point we'll go back and dig further and see how much of our fish we have there.

The day we met at the lab, Chris took us back out into the field to see the Xiphactinus, along with another fossil find.

There are two projects we're going to take a look at.

There's a really large fish called Xiphactinus.

And then there's another exciting fossil on the hill behind us here.

It's the tail of a mosasaur.

And it's the largest mosasaur we had in Kansas.

It's one of our state fossils called Tylosaurus.

And today our goal is mostly to evaluate the Tylosaur tail, give us an idea of what it's going to take to excavate the specimen.

We might also consolidate or kind of glue our Zephactinus a little bit because he's kind of exposed pretty well right now.

So from here to here you're kind of getting a sense that there's something here.

So these two features right here are both of the lower jaws.

And then we're going to go right in the left half to the lower jaws like that.

One of the pieces that was here we've removed just because it was loose is called a pre-maxilla.

So it's part of the tip of the upper snout there.

We do have the maxilla, both of the maxilla there.

So we're actually basically seeing the jaw of the fish right here.

Upper jaw, lower jaw.

This is kind of the opening of the mouth.

There would have been a large number of teeth.

We can see the broken root of, in that pre-maxilla, they have these large fang teeth.

And this one's been washed away.

But right there you can actually see a tooth that's probably from this maxilla here.

What's really special about this Xiphactinus here is that most of the time we find these fish, they're really disarticulated.

They've all separated into all these pieces, whether that's from scavenging, whether that's decomposition, or even just the action of currents on the sea floor.

What we'll do from here is you kind of see this, a bit of this hump right here.

We will go back to where it steepens there and begin to cut down from there.

We'll open up an area here that's maybe three feet by three feet roughly.

We'll see if it's just the skull itself.

How nice is the rest of the skull?

Hopefully it's all articulated nicely.

And if we're lucky or unlucky, maybe there'll be a bunch of vertebrae that are continuing.

One of the ways you can guesstimate the length of the fish is with the lower jaw.

One inch of lower jaw is equivalent roughly to one foot of fish.

So if your lower jaw is ten inches long, it came from about a ten foot fish.

Just kind of look at some of the proportions here.

We're probably a twelve to fourteen foot, kind of a good size, average size monster fish.

Yeah.

So now we've talked about our Xiphactinus.

We're going to go over to our Mosasaur.

And I'd like to kind of evaluate that specimen and get a sense of is it just a few vertebrae?

Is there more going on here?

What's it going to take to excavate that one?

So one of our goals today is just sort of evaluate this big Mosasaur tail over here.

Do you know what portion of the critter you have here?

Well, that's one of the things I hope to answer today.

When we actually begin digging on our fossil, that'll give us a better sense of well, are we up here?

Are we in the middle?

Are we towards the tail?

Right now, I think we're somewhere in the middle.

So I've just put a temporary cover over it.

So from here, we'll go ahead and take our cover off and then start to get a sense of what things are looking like.

Let's take a look.

There you go.

So they're a little fractured, but you can see the end of a vertebrae here, one vertebrae here, the next one's here.

Then there's a bit of an offset.

This next one is a little bit in this direction here.

So this is where they're articulating right here?

Yep.

Between two.

And we were talking about that ball and socket structure they have.

Unfortunately, the ball is facing this way, which means the head was long gone.

Basically.

But it's still a large, interesting, big animal.

So every time you get one of these, it's worth digging on, even if it's not the skull.

So we're starting to get a sense of this next vertebrae here.

So we had our first vertebrae here that's really broken fairly badly.

This one here, I think we have that chunk.

We might be able to reattach that chunk.

Our third vertebrae's here.

Our fourth one's here.

Our fifth one is coming into view here.

And then we'll see if we continue past that point there.

So at least it does seem to be kind of curving a little bit further into the rock.

If it was curving that way, that would be working against us.

And so curling into the rock is good news.

It's got more room to be in there.

This was kind of exciting because I had a guy come up to me and say, "Well, you know, I've got some ground.

I have some chalk on it.

And you can go look on there if you want."

And I said, "Heck yeah, that sounds awesome."

And I found like four Mosasaur pieces in one day on there.

So that was a really... You impressed him, didn't you?

Well, I guess so.

I just appreciate him coming to me like that.

I think people appreciate that the fossils stay locally or displayed at the museum right down the road because with some of the commercial collecting that's done out here, you know, those end up, who knows where, you know, in a private collection in somebody's house.

Right.

Well, and personally, I'm all for maintaining it locally.

It gives people a better feeling of the community and the environment and everything.

I can kind of see both sides.

It is cool that our fossils end up around the world, that they are globally significant.

But, you know, if none of that material stays here, then that's a bit of a shame too.

So this is still looking good.

We're getting our... This is our next vertebra here.

So let's see how many we're up to now.

So one partial one and then two, three, four, five, six, seven.

And it's looking really pretty good here.

At least it's more than... Sometimes you just find just one or two or three, you know?

Sure.

And the fact that this curve here is kind of interesting.

It is going... It's going where there is room, which is nice to see, right?

If it was curving this way, there's really nowhere for it to go.

The fact that it's curving into the rock here gives it a little room to be in there.

And so far, so good.

Sometimes you got to be a little careful flipping big chunks of rock out.

Yeah, that's a... I'm just going to see if I can find the end of this next vertebra here.

Then I'll probably clean up this a little bit and then we'll glue it real nice and get some pictures.

And the only problem is we're going towards the tail.

Boy, if this is going headwards, you could not get me out of here.

I would just be... The skull alone would be five feet long.

I mean, the teeth would be as big as your thumb.

It would be such a cool thing to have.

So hopefully on the camera you can see what we have going on.

There's those original vertebrae that were exposed.

There was the one that was offset.

And since then we've followed them in and they're nicely articulated, meaning they're still connected to each other and they're strongly going back in there.

I'm still trying to figure out exactly where in the body we are.

The coddle, the tail vertebrae get sort of square and kind of fat.

The ones in the middle part of the body are a little more elongated.

They also have different things sticking off of them.

If you think about the part of your body where there's ribs, those vertebrae that connect to the ribs look different than when you get down here, you don't really have ribs here.

So those vertebrae don't have the little things that stick off for the ribs there.

So just in terms of placing ourself, the head would have been this direction years and years ago if it ever was there.

We're kind of looking roughly about this part of the body here.

This is the dorsal or kind of the upward, the backside.

So this would have been dorsal.

The ribs would have been on this lower portion here.

So we can just barely make out, I uncovered a few pieces there.

There's a rib that goes here, a second rib that goes here.

I'm sure if we dug this down a little bit, we'd find another series of ribs.

So we're kind of seeing things in this part of the body here.

But boy, this sequence here is really exciting to see that.

So our goal today was to just evaluate.

It was possible that there was only three or four vertebrae on the surface, but we were pretty lucky in the sense that things picked up nicely here.

Our vertebrae curved in towards the hill, giving it more room to be in there.

They're strongly articulated.

They have ribs and all the processes on them.

And so, like I said, we're midway through the animal here.

So we've got room for 10 or even 15 feet more tail to be had here.

This gives us a good idea of what to expect going forward.

Yeah, so this is an exploratory thing to see.

Yeah, our goal today was just to evaluate.

Well, I always do think my favorite part is finding the fossil.

Sometimes people say, what's the favorite fossil?

And sometimes it's fun to say, well, the next one.

That's my favorite fossil.

The one I haven't found yet.

The one I haven't found yet.

We're surrounded here by acres, really miles of this chalk rock.

We've had a lot of rain this year.

And so just that thrill of finding something is probably the most exciting part.

But then to see, okay, what is really here?

The evaluating, weighing, well, how much effort is this going to take?

How is it laid out in here?

Really starting to learn more about the fossil that you've caught in this exciting part.

There's just so much to this whole experience.

You know, you don't find these tylosaurs too often.

And when you do, you just find disarticulated parts and pieces.

So to have an articulated series of, yeah, that's what you want to see.

That's the exciting thing.

So there's a lot to the process.

But this is a fun part right here.

It's just to really dig into what you're looking at.