Cottonwood Connection

Kansas Fossils and a New Generation

Season 5 Episode 1 | 25mVideo has Closed Captions

Join us as we look at the efforts of passing on the study of Kansas’ fossil deep records.

Aired 09/22/2024

Cottonwood Connection

Kansas Fossils and a New Generation

Season 5 Episode 1 | 25mVideo has Closed Captions

Join us as we look at the efforts of passing on the study of Kansas’ fossil deep records.

We take a look at various efforts to pass on the study of Kansas’ fascinating fossil record to a new generation, including time with the students of the Sternberg Summer Camp Program as they explore the area’s paleontological past.

Aired 09/22/2024

Problems with Closed Captions? Closed Captioning Feedback

Cottonwood Connection is a local public television program presented by Smoky Hills PBS

Cottonwood Connection

Kansas Fossils and a New Generation

Season 5 Episode 1 | 25mVideo has Closed Captions

Aired 09/22/2024

Problems with Closed Captions? Closed Captioning Feedback

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[music] In the mid-1880s, fossils of sea creatures were discovered in the chalk beds of western Kansas. In the decades since, generations of paleontologists have continued to be inspired by the mysteries of the Great Plains' ancient past. [Music] [Music] Northwest Kansas and western third of the state is rich with the fossils of the Cretaceous Age, the geological age that's in the chalk rock or the yellow rock that's very prominent in the high plains.

There was at one time a shallow sea, so these ancient creatures have sunk to the bottom and were immediately covered over so they weren't exposed out so they were able to fossilize.

And paleontology is the study of ancient life.

Although it's been going on for 160 years out here in the high plains with the Sternbergs starting back in the 19th century and carrying through in a big Sternberg Museum in Hays, there are still a lot of new discoveries that are being made and new classifications of critters because there's more data now than there used to be for comparison analysis and stuff. So we have a person in Scott City now by the name of Kristopher Super going into the paleontology and the fossil record and working on the preservation of it. So my name is Kristopher Super.

We're here at the El Quartelijo Museum.

This is in Scott City, way out in western Kansas here.

The room we're standing in here is our Western Kansas Fossil Lab.

In the center of our lab here you see we've got this giant slab of rock.

Within this slab of rock are the bones of a really cool fossil animal called an elasmosaur.

This was an animal that I discovered on my birthday back in March of 2021 and since then we've gone through the process of excavating, collecting, removing the bones and now we're here in the lab preparing the fossil.

So how do I know where to find a fossil?

For me I begin on something like Google Earth, you know, I'm like, "Hey, what are the options?

Where are things at?"

But you can't just walk out on anybody's pasture, right?

This is in Kansas, I think it's like 99% privately owned land, you know.

In other states like Colorado maybe have more Bureau of Land Management, more federal lands where there's different rules.

So you do have to know kind of the rules to play by and in this case it involves getting the permission of the people who own the land. In this case we had some really great landowners we're working with.

They're really open to this whole process here.

So I was kind of going up this great Chalky Valley and not finding a lot that day.

It was kind of sometimes you'll step out of the car, you find a fossil right away.

Other times you'll walk for hours and hours not having a lot of luck.

It was one of those days.

Coming to the top of the hill I was looking across, I saw some chunks on the surface there.

I said "Hey, okay, look like interesting chunks.

" Got a little bit closer, started using my detail eyes, right?

And saw that, "Hey, well these aren't just any kind of chunks, these are pieces of bone."

I saw a vertebra part of the spine that was slightly sort of figure eight shape.

There were a few other characteristics that helped me identify kind of what group animals this I was looking at here.

Then I started kind of scratching into the hill a little bit.

Those one or two bones on the surface became six, seven, eight, ten, twelve bones.

And then at that point we had a whole excavation going.

There were a series of vertebrae that were articulated, meaning they're still kind of together in sequence.

I followed that sequence of vertebrae back for about six feet or so.

On either side of those vertebrae there were big paddle bones, something like you might like a humerus or a femur.

Some of the ribs were nearly a meter long, which starts to suggest that the size of the animal we're dealing with here.

Once we figured out where most of the bone layer was, the trick of collecting it without destroying it was the idea.

So this is how we collect a fossil in some cases. This is just burlap, which you might see for a potato sack or that kind of thing. I run it through plaster of Paris and I usually put a separator over the bone. You don't want to put the plaster directly onto the bone, so something like paper towels or aluminum foil to create a layer of separation works pretty good. Then if you look at our slab here, you'll see a series of layers built up like layers of a tree maybe.

The idea here is just to prevent any sort of moving or cracking of the bones.

If you try to pick them up, they would just crumble into a million tiny fragments.

The whole plastering or jacketing process was next. Then we sort of undercut this giant slab and had about ten 4-H-ers help us flip it over.

Then we were able to kind of back it out of that valley and bring it to the museum here where we're now doing the preparation phase. That involves using a variety of tools. Things like this air scribe is one of the tools we use.

This is basically like a vibrating steel pencil powered by compressed air.

This tool works really good.

This large one is best for removing bulk material when you're farthest away from the bones.

As we get closer and closer to the bones, we switch to smaller and smaller tools.

The very last bit I'll actually do under magnification, under microscope, just to really get that last little bit.

We'll maybe use things like air abrasives to kind of further clean the surface. It's just a variety of very patient sort of detail-oriented work for hours and hours and days and days.

It's not something you want to rush.

These are very rare animals.

This is a very important data point in the story of our Western Kansas fossil heritage. You don't want to ruin it or make any mistakes.

Like I said, the animal we're working on here is called an Elasmosaur.

You might know them as the Loch Ness Monster.

They're a reptile, a marine reptile, meaning they lived in the oceans, but they're famous for that unusual long neck.

This really connects to some of the earliest paleo stories in Kansas.

We have up in Fort Wallace in the 1860s, there was an army doctor up there who found a similar specimen.

That kind of set off the investigations into what these animals are, how they work, all that kind of stuff.

There have been about a dozen or so individual Elasmosaurs found in Kansas, but most of those consist of just chunks, just fragments, a few vertebrae here, maybe a paddle bone here, just very sort of elusive.

To find the skull with the body is incredibly rare. For some reason, you imagine the skull on the end of this giant sort of fishing pole here, it just tends to want to separate, I guess, or maybe things were tearing it off or who knows, but for some reason the skulls are not often found with the bodies.

There's questions about why that is and to have the skull with this specimen is what makes it so significant.

This specimen is going to help us answer all sorts of questions about the anatomy of this animal, about sort of the ecology of this animal, how it lived, what he can tell us about that past environment, when this was underwater, right?

Something like the skull, we're going to get it micro CT scanned, we're going to be able to see all these new features.

Ideally, we're going to get a number of scientific publications from the specimen, some of which may focus on the anatomy of the skull.

A lot of the post cranial, the stuff behind the skull is not well known.

For example, the original one, the Fort Wallace specimen, the pectoral and pelvic griddles were destroyed and so we have sketches of them, but to have actual, you know, things to compare to are great.

Yeah, ever since I was a little toddler, I remember picking out horn corals in the gravel of our front yard there, but one of the big moments for me was I was in the Boy Scouts, we took a trip over to Castle Rock, which is in Eastern Grove County.

I was always, I've been a longtime fan of climbing on stuff, you know, whether it's the 14,000 foot peaks in Colorado or just the chalk bluffs in Western Kansas and climbing to the top of one of these big bluffs, I was probably 10 or 11 years old, I found a shark tooth on the top of this tower in a cow pasture and I said, "Okay, well, what's the story here?

How did this get here?"

That led me to Oceans of Kansas, that book by Mike Everhart, which I just just tore through that book and that point I was hooked, you know. My name is Mike Everhart.

I'm an adjunct curator of paleontology at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Hayes, Kansas.

I've been interested in paleontology since the fifth grade.

I had a teacher that introduced me to rocks. She was a rock collector, but she also showed me fossils too and then came across the book by Roy Chaplin Andrews, who was a famous paleontologist years ago in the teens and he had two oceans of Kansas and that got me hooked on the idea that here we were in the middle of North America and this was once an ocean for millions of years.

So when I got into college, I got an opportunity to go to Western Kansas and collect sharks' teeth for the first time in Ellis County and things just kind of grew from that.

I collected my first Mosasaur, gosh, 50 years ago and been doing it ever since.

You know, the hobby to begin with and then when I retired from Boeing, my wife and I picked it up for almost full-time.

We were out there three weekends a month, that sort of thing.

So collecting, donating fossils, writing papers, and eventually writing the Oceans of Kansas books, first and second edition.

The first fossils from Kansas were actually discovered in the 1860s and 1870s and part of that was the Western Movement. In late 1860s, a railroad was built from, would have been from Kansas City all the way to Denver.

In order to do that, there were three forts that were in place across the state, Fort Harker, Fort Hayes, and then Fort Wallace almost to the Colorado border.

And with that, some of the most educated people in the state were the military doctors that were assigned to those forts and they became the first real fossil collectors here in Kansas.

Dr. Sternberg, who was the uncle of Charlie Sternberg and great uncle of George Sternberg, was a military doctor out of Fort Harker and he collected the type specimen of the big fish we called xiphacttinus.

And then farther west at Fort Wallace, Dr. Theophilus Turner discovered the first known elasmosaur, elasmosaurus platyurus, in the late 1868, I believe.

But that's also the largest fossil collected in the world at that particular time and that kind of sparked a fossil rush to Kansas. Dr.

Turner's elasmosaur went to Edward Cope, a paleontologist in Philadelphia.

But the first leading paleontologist to make his way to Kansas was Cope's rival, O.C.

Marsh. Cope and Marsh were the prominent paleontologists in the 1870s and 80s.

Marsh came out here with a group of students, graduate students, from Yale College in 1870 and collected mosasaurs and all kinds of other fossils from the chalk. He discovered the wing bones of the first pteranodon and figured out how big it was and everything and it really got him excited about Kansas.

Cope actually hired people to collect for him in Kansas.

From then on, you know, Kansas was exporting lots and lots, literally thousands of specimens.

Cope and Marsh both were looking for the biggest and the baddest of everything, particularly things with teeth or giant size, the largest dinosaurs or the most, you know, whatever.

So big was better and that allowed them or caused them to overlook a lot of fossils here in Kansas.

And the other thing was going on with Marsh, he ended up being terribly interested in birds and pterosaurs, pteranodon from Kansas.

He wasn't interested in fishes and he literally told his collectors to leave those for Sternberg.

Cope happened to hire a young Charlie Sternberg.

I think he was 24 years old here in Kansas and he went on to to marry and have three sons that went into paleontology.

They were kind of the second wave in the state along with Williston and some other paleontologists out of the University of Kansas.

Then they started collecting dinosaurs and moved up into the northwest into Montana and finally into Canada.

George came back to Kansas and set up shop in western Kansas out of Oakley and he was actually paying the rent for his lab facility out in Oakley, Kansas by giving fossils to the local school system.

He thought every school should have fossils on display for kids to learn about these things.

Well in the process he managed to promote himself enough to Fort Hays that they hired him as their museum director at the State Teachers College. He had collected the fish and the fish. He'd done a tremendous amount of stuff out there within western Kansas fossils. Still we were missing out on a lot of little things and the connections between the little things.

People did not understand the stratigraphy and the age of fossils relative to one another.

The chalk is five million years old from top to bottom but there's a very steady progression of species within that time period.

There was a big opportunity when I started collecting to see some of the little things and see some of the connections.

I made another kind of major discovery in 2012.

We were on a family reunion and a lot of my family had never been to Castle Rock.

I'm like guys it's the coolest area ever we got to go check this out.

During that family reunion I ended up finding the bones of small sort of fish like animal.

Wasn't really sure.

Took it home.

I was kind of working on it.

A piece slipped off.

Turned it over.

There was a complete fossil eel on the inside.

That was the first introduction.

I reached out to Mike Everhart.

I said hey this is something really cool.

What do you think about this?

He said this is something that should be donated to the museum where it can be studied.

I went ahead and did that.

That put me in touch with a lot of the Sternberg folks.

I was lucky to be part of the very first Sternberg Science Summer Camp back in 2014.

That one was focused on field work.

We collected the bones of a Mosasaur. Learned about some of the methods involved in collecting and photographing and removing a specimen from the field like that.

Since then David's taken that and really grown it further.

Now they have sort of a lab component, a museum component.

It's really great to see what they've done with that. Hi there.

My name is David Levering.

I am the Camps Director here at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History here in Hays.

Most of my job involves working with middle and high school kids.

A lot of our program is field-based and a lot of the field-based programs we do, especially here in Kansas, revolve around vertebrate paleontology.

I'm just like a really, I'm a paleontology nerd.

I've been really into stuff since I was like two.

This is my first actual paleontology experience. I've learned how to prospect.

Our students are really, really excited to finally get to excavate.

Now that we are here they spent the first day establishing a grid so that they can record where the fossils are coming out of and we don't lose that information as we take things out. And they also flagged anything that they thought looked interesting.

We didn't really give them a lot of information about how to find fossils day one because we wanted them to figure it out and we wanted them to flag things that weren't fossils too so that we could talk about what fossils were and what some of the other rocks were as well.

So today they're going around back to those flags and recording where they are and collecting them in a really systematic way.

And we make a big map of three by three grids so we can absolutely make sure we have everything.

We take pictures for context.

We make sure we have something of scale next to it so we can determine how big it is.

It needs to be used during research and so it's easy to determine what it is.

My name is Georgie and I'm the master mapper.

So what that means is for the grid I write down where we find fossils in the grid.

In D2 we found a tooth so that was the second fossil we found.

So it was number two.

If we don't have the map then we have no organization which is very bad.

I've just kind of always had an interest in fossils and paleontology.

That is the field or one of the fields that I would like to go into when I grow up.

We found a really cool tooth.

Nathan found a really cool tooth yesterday.

When I first found the tooth I thought it was a cashew that someone had previously left.

I uncovered it more from the sand and I realized oh it has a root.

That's not a cashew.

I found something that Dr. Simpson said could be like the name of a small animal and then I found another funky boat.

Dr. Simpson said could be pelvis or a skull.

I've come out here just to get more experience and paleontology and honestly more importantly geology just as a whole to further enrich myself a little bit.

Where are you from? Georgia.

Oh wow you came a ways.

Yep. We are D5. We are hole D...

Pit, square D5?

Square D5.

Grid D5 yes.

So we're taking the photo to mark where it was on our big map.

It's a tiny little piece.

I found this one yesterday. And then we have to record the site number.

The date or site number which is of the date the coordinate session and fossil number.

This is our ninth fossil of the day.

Learning facts and figures a lot of the students will come in knowing a lot of that stuff.

They'll come there we typically get kids that are already very excited about science.

Their ability to think about multiple kinds of information simultaneously and create a comprehensive question that could be used to investigate something.

That is an area that we do a lot of work with them to develop and that's something that our students typically cite at the end of camp is something that they feel they've gotten a lot better at is thinking about the interrelationship between different kinds of information and the connectivity between different areas of science as a result. I'm Carson Cope. I'm the instructor for this camp and here we are doing advanced fossil preparation.

What that entails is teaching these high school students everything that goes on with fossils for a moment to come from fields to a moment to enter our collections.

That's restoring these fossils cleaning rock and sediment off of them putting them back together.

Yeah so something we do typically right at the beginning when we get the fossil is we sketch it so that we can both have a documentation of what it looked like when we started and also just take notes of anything important like any structures or possible areas of concern.

So this is my personal project it is part of a mosasaur jaw.

You can kind of see some of the matrix on this first tooth as you can see the progress that's been made there and also some slight progress over here.

Other aspects are that if I flip it over you can see that this is one of the major areas of concern I was talking about.

There's this pretty large crack it runs through both sides although it's slightly more noticeable here.

So this is a mosasaur skull these are these giant extinct lizards that swim in the Cretaceous Sea waves of Kansas.

So what we're trying to figure out right now is it looks like we found a lot of teeth near a skull and this is very common in prep work that we find fragments of bones especially teeth. Teeth are very fragile and so we're just trying to ascertain where they are try and find more of them and hopefully we'll be able to piece them together.

It's very neat to find all these teeth.

I'm currently living in China and I've lived there for around 11 years or so and we we heard about the great camps here in Kansas and doing all this work surrounding like paleontology and fossils which can provide a great research and like learning opportunity. I think it was my mom who stumbled across the Sternberg camps online and they seemed pretty perfect because they had a wide variety of different things so it wasn't just field they also had fossil prep and last year I did a camp about the physics of dinosaurs and marine vertebrates which was really fun. Well for me it was when I was really young I was one of those kids who really liked dinosaurs and then as I got older I kind of grew more into enjoying just the general science of it.

I just really liked the idea of looking at these fossils which are the only things we have of these living creatures and reconstructing them and figuring out how they would have lived and what life would have been like back then because it's just so different and it really interested me in that way. The High Plains and especially Kansas one of the richest places for Cretaceous fossils in the world.

You know we've been collecting in the Smoky Hill Chalk for 170 years now even so in the last 10 years 10-15 years I've been part of naming six new species of animals and these aren't little animals these are big things that came from this state and I'm here to say that if I can do it it means that anybody else that is interested in seriously pursuing paleontology in western Kansas is gonna find something new too.

When I was very young in the Boy Scouts you know a lot of my information was coming from that book Oceans of Kansas and I had read it and reread it and tried to learn everything about it.

Mike then came out with the second edition just recently and paging to the second edition I found that I was included in that second edition a number of times for discoveries I had made since reading that first book so that was quite a moment yeah to go from reading a book to being in the book yeah.

One of the reasons I like it so well preservation is great and lots of times you find fairly complete animals and it's easy to dig them up but on the flip side of that if we're not collecting these specimens these bones as they come out as they rode out of the chalk mother nature will destroy them in the space of a few years.

They've been preserved perfectly for millions of years but once they come out on the surface if we don't pick them up they're gone.

Education is so important and you know from just from my experience as a fifth grader my teacher caught my attention that year and I never stopped looking.

I've collected fossils for more than 70 years and I'd love to go do it again tomorrow.

There's something to go out there and uncover something that has been on the ground for millions of years and you're the first person ever to see it and if you can get kids to look at it that way I mean to understand that hey you found something nobody else has ever seen.

Can't get much more better than that. [music]

Cottonwood Connection is a local public television program presented by Smoky Hills PBS