[Music] Visiting the Fort Wallace Museum in Wallace, Kansas, one quickly sees a quality display that tells the story of a western Kansas military base and the settlement of the area.

It is what one might expect.

And then you turn a corner, and are faced with a 30-foot cast of a seagoing dinosaur.

This creature and its discovery help shape the story the museum tells, a story both historic and ancient.

Beneath the cast of the ancient sea creature, whose scientific name is Elasmosaurus Plataeurus, sits a thoughtful and studious looking figure.

This is a representation of Dr.

Theophilus Turner.

The story of him and his discovery of this Elasmusaur was told in the film Thof's Dragon, created by the Fort Wallace Memorial Association and scripted by historian Deb Goodrich.

Dr.

Turner is a veteran of the Civil War.

He sees quite a bit of action, but as a doctor.

His family expects him once the war is over.

He's going to come back to New Jersey and he's going to set up a practice.

But no, he re-enlists and he comes out west to Fort Dodge and then he's here at Fort Wallace.

There's something that draws him to it, even though he talks about how lonely the outpost is here.

He is drawn to that life.

Part of that may be because he has the mind and heart, I think, of a scientist.

And those post-doctors, post-surgeons, are the scientists on the ground for the federal government.

So it is his job, not just his interest, but it is part of his job to look for fossils, to look for the plant and animal life out here in the American West, the minerals, and to document those things.

In 1867, we are front and center of the Plains Indian Wars.

We are in the hotbed right here.

And yet he and Comstock, Medicine Bill Comstock, who is the Fort Scout, discover about 12, 14 miles east of here and overlooking what would have been Sheridan at the time.

They find this incredible fossil.

And to hear folks tell it, there were fossils just laying on the ground in that area.

And if you walk that ground, it's different.

It is black.

There's nothing growing.

You've got all these different rocks and minerals.

And there's selenite and mica and just all kinds of crazy things there.

There's one story that there was a Mossasaur discovered there that was 75 feet long.

It was on exhibit in the jeweler's shop there in Sheridan.

And that has disappeared.

But this one is very properly documented.

And I think that's because of Dr.

Turner.

He had gone to medical school in Philadelphia, so he was very familiar with the Natural History Museum there.

And so he contacts Dr.

Cope at the Natural History Museum, who gets very excited when he sees just the few vertebrae that Dr.

Turner sends him and says, "Send us the whole thing."

So in the midst of the Plains Indian Wars, they are going back and forth from Fort Wallace.

That 12 or 14 miles is very dangerous at this point.

And setting up where they do to dig out this fossil is very dangerous.

Though, apparently, the Cheyenne believed the actual area where they found it was haunted.

And again, for obvious reasons, it looks different.

It's as if this ground is dead because it's dark and there's all these bones.

And so you would understand why they would think there was something going on there.

But the ground in between is not haunted.

So it was very dangerous for them to dig this up.

But they did.

And they eventually send it back to Philadelphia where it has been ever since.

Well, Dr.

Turner is here at Fort Wallace.

He corresponds with his family back in New Jersey.

And of course, this discovery is going to be pretty exciting.

So he writes to his brothers about this.

And they tease him.

When he was a child, they called him Thof, T-H-O-F, because they could not say Theophilus.

And so they start calling his new discovery Thof's dragon.

And he refers to other plesiosaurs that had been discovered.

There had been some things found.

It's not like this is the first plesiosaur ever discovered by any means.

So there was something to compare it to.

But this was a lot bigger than what they had seen before.

And so this is pretty exciting.

But Dr.

Turner dies here at Fort Wallace in 1869.

So his correspondence with Dr.

Cope in Philadelphia is going to be brief.

And he is not going to have the opportunity to go back east and see this on exhibit.

So that correspondence between Dr.

Cope and between Thof and his brothers is just sort of lost for a while.

And it's considered Dr.

Cope's discovery.

And not that I think Dr.

Cope sought to write him out of the picture.

It just doesn't become as significant because he's not there visiting and continuing to donate things like other post surgeons would be doing.

So it's not until what is it, the 90s, maybe that some of these letters come to light and we realize Dr.

Turner's collection.

Turner's discovery helped spark a wave of fossil hunting in western Kansas, unearthing fossils on display all over the world, including places like the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

But the work hasn't stopped.

Don Rowlison visited Kristopher Super at the Western Kansas Fossil Lab at the El Quartelejo Museum in Scott City to catch up on progress on his discovery of a fossil similar to Turner's.

So there's a lot of variance in these fossils as paleontology advances, the more paleontologists are out, new discoveries are made all the time.

This country out here for fossil specimens is like a big Christmas present.

You never know what's in it until you open it.

This was like a birthday present because it was found on my actual birthday.

Well, hey, that's good.

No two discoveries are really the same as far as you can't look at a quick thing in a rock and say this is how it's in here because they all die differently.

They all have different contexts and they all have different things.

Yeah, Turner's discovery was a pretty big deal at the time.

That was the very first elasmusuar that anybody had seen.

You know, this is an animal unlike anybody you could even imagine, really.

I mean, there's no animal that even comes close to this today.

So Turner's discovery came from the pier shale, which is a little bit of a higher formation, a little bit younger than this formation.

So this isn't earlier, just earlier in the span of a few million years, we would say geologically.

You know, his specimen is my understanding that the vertebral column was almost complete.

So they had vertebrae all the way to nearly the very back of the skull, all the way to the tip of the tail.

They also had the pectoral and pelvic bones that were present.

Although I think they were missing some of the finer digits and the ribs maybe were disturbed.

The ribs might have been very thin and flat and many of those thin flat elements were probably what were damaged or lost during the collection effort.

So our specimen is a little different.

Mine is somewhat jumbled.

There seems to have been a fair amount of scavenging after the animal was dead.

And we know this because of bite marks on bones of shed teeth from sharks and mosasaurs that left the sort of culling cards with the specimen.

But we did preserve the... here we have the digits.

Our skull is complete.

I was able to save many more ribs, I think, than that historic specimen.

So those are some of the similarities and some of the differences and some of that stems from the method of collection and maybe even the preservation of the animal originally.

For instance, this one has what are called gastroliths, which are stones found in a stomach or what more people are familiar with a chicken gizzard where they have sand and stuff in there.

Yeah, we can look at the teeth of the animal.

We see these long curved needle like teeth, which I'm sure are great for catching a slippery fish or a squid.

We've even found little small fish vertebrae mixed in with some of the stones.

So it's pretty clear they were eating things like fish.

But those teeth are not well suited for chewing actions or grinding.

So the idea is they would swallow that fish nearly whole once it's smaller.

Yeah.

And then there's a muscle that precedes the digestive system, which today we would call a crop or a gizzard.

And even under a microscopic view, some of these gastroliths or stomach stones have little crescent shaped marks on them.

And that's from as this muscle push the stones together, the stones pushed against each other and left little sort of marks on each other.

So that's further evidence that these are in fact stomach stones and not just random rocks.

Yeah, I wonder if the Turner specimen might have had the gastroliths associated.

They might not have recognized those.

They might have said, oh, this is just, yeah, it's a natural recurring.

So I really have wondered, you know, I don't, there's no clear record of gastroliths with the Turner one, although it would seem likely that that would be present.

But that was very early on.

And they didn't have a lot of things figured out.

I mean, the first one always has gobs of questions.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, even which side does the head go on, for example?

Yeah.

And so with the plesiosaurs, these were found all over the world, right?

Yeah, today they're found all over the world, I think almost on every, even Antarctica.

So they're well known from Africa and from Asia, Eurasia, from, I wonder about South American material.

I certainly well known from North America, even all the way up into the high Arctic parts of Canada.

So at one point, plesiosaurs as a group were doing really well.

And they were widespread.

They had many different forms.

This is a diagram that I stole off the internet, but it gives a great sort of overview of the family plesiosaurea.

Here and here, those long neck guys, those are what we call elasmosaurus, elasmosaurids.

This larger individual, that's elasmosaurus.

That's the Turner specimen.

That's the original one.

The smaller one down here is Styxosaurus, which is another elasmosaur, but it occurs a little bit earlier in the formation.

Other plesiosaurs fall into a category we call pliosaurids.

So they have huge massive heads and short, robust necks.

There were some you might compare to a dolphin called polyketylids.

Yeah, I never imagined that I would find one of these.

They're really, really rare actually in the Smoky Hill chaulk.

And even in the, generally speaking, in Western Kansas, elasmosaurs are not common animals.

So I originally discovered this specimen in March of 2021.

So there was a period of over a year that it took to open up the quarry and to get that cast made and to get the specimen removed.

And then we had to bring it back to the lab.

During a lot of that time, I was a high school teacher.

So I had all the summer to do this great work.

And then I would get a little busy during the school year.

So there was kind of stop and go for a little while you guys came and visited.

And in that last year, I've now been added to the staff of the museum as as a preparator here.

So now five days a week, I'm here doing work on the specimen, we've really seen kind of a pickup in the pace of work.

So since the last time you were here, I have made a fair bit of progress.

One of the most exciting elements I've uncovered is over here.

This is the scapula of the animal, which if we look back to our model here, it's one of these large flat elements and sort of the chest region.

This is one of the best elasmosaurus scapulas that I think exists from this time and place.

The original Turner specimen did have wonderful examples of the pectoral and pelvic region.

Unfortunately, they were destroyed.

So to have this new element on display is great.

There's a series of ribs that are showing up here.

Some of these ribs are relatively short.

The rib that's a little bit closer to me here measures nearly 20 inches long.

And if you imagine how your ribs come in pairs like this, if that's a rib and that's a rib, well, shoot, how big around would this guy be?

This really gives a sense of scale.

One of the other areas I've been working since your last visit is right through here.

These are all actually digits, finger bones.

We would call this a paddle or a flipper in this case.

Early on, there were sort of arguments about, well, how are these animals generating their forward motion?

Is it the paddles that are doing the movement or is it the tail that supplies this forward force?

The paddles are for steering maybe.

So it's fun to dig into some of the biomechanics too that that can tell us.

Here we can see a really interesting feature of this is the main part of the backbone or the spine.

And each of these vertebrae that make up the spine have a really interesting process called a neural spine.

This is a point where there would have been lots of muscles attaching.

The neck would have been actually fairly thick.

I think historically they show them with, I call noodle necks, these thin little wimpy elasmasaur necks.

But if you examine the bone here, there's this huge vertical neural spine where there would have been a lot of muscle attachment.

In historic specimens or specimens found on the surface that is actually quite thin and is the first element you tend to lose through erosion or through rough collecting.

Luckily with our plaster jacketing technique here, we were able to leave a lot of material in the original condition and save those fine features like these huge neural arch structures.

So I'm really excited to continue pushing slowly this direction and getting a whole series of these large neural spines kind of lined up.

You see a lot of these parallel marks were made by a tool called an air scribe, which is like a vibrating sort of air powered chisel.

This is how I can strategically trim through the layers of rock.

As I get closer to the bone, my tools get smaller and smaller.

Yeah, when I'm out in the field, sure, I'm using jack hammers.

I'm using power tools.

Just think about how great it is to have power tools.

You know, these guys had manpower and maybe horsepower.

That was about all they got.

Nowadays, we have these, I brought a large generator out there.

We had all these sort of bobcats and front loaders and all these big pieces of equipment, not to mention the power tools, the air tools.

So I had it pretty good compared to what those folks were working with back in the 1860s.

Super continues with the preparation of his discovery.

In Dr.

Turner's time, paleontology was still a relatively new science.

And when he sent his fossils to Dr.

Edward Drinker Cope, they went to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, one of the oldest such museums in the country, dating back to the early 1800s.

The museum featured Dr.

Turner's Elasmosaur when it opened the doors of its new building in 1876, a building it still occupies today under the ownership of Drexler University, and which still prominently displays a cast of Thof's dragon, greeting visitors as they enter the museum.

My name is Jason Downs.

I'm a research scientist here at the Academy of Natural Sciences Museum.

We're standing right now in the vertebrate paleontology department, and this is a department with over 27,000 specimens right now.

And we're a museum that is actually the oldest in continuous operation anywhere in the Western Hemisphere.

So our history goes all the way back to the year 1812.

And that's a great history to compile all of these materials, not only in this department and others, but one of the interesting treasures of the vertebrate paleontology collection is the holotype specimen of Elasmosaurus platyurus.

So that original specimen is housed here in this cabinet.

It has been casted and turned into mounted skeletons that appear in many institutions around the world, including Fort Wallace in Kansas, and also here at the Academy of Natural Sciences.

It hangs out in our lobby area.

So I'll open up the cabinet to have an opportunity to look at the original fossil materials, which are only here.

What we've got on this drawer here is one of the most dramatic parts of the Elasmosaurus platyurus skeleton, which is the vertebral column.

What we recognize is that Elasmosaurus as an Elasmosaurid plesiosaur has an incredibly long neck, and so it also has many, many vertebrae in that neck.

And so they fill a number of drawers here.

It's actually this drawer here and this platform here, which I can't pull, and then this drawer above.

So this is both neck vertebrae and then also vertebrae deeper into the column.

During the Lake Cretaceous and into the early Paleocene, the North America was flooded with ocean water, and that's a result of the fact that oceans were higher at the time than they are now.

The Western Interior Seaway covered part of Western North America, including the area in Kansas where these fossils are from.

And that's why we're finding marine vertebrates so far interior, so far away from the shorelines of today.

Edward Drinker Cope gave this fossil the name Elasmosaurus platyurus, and the first name, Elasmosaurus, actually means "metal plate lizard."

The metal plate is actually thought to refer to the shape of some of the bones in the pectoral girdle or shoulder and the pelvis, which are kind of flat, platey bones.

But that's where the name comes from.

And then platyurus, the second part of the species name, actually means "flat tail."

And again, that is just an anatomical descriptor for the shape of the tail.

So both Elasmosaurus and platyurus are describing anatomical parts of the skeleton.

One of the interesting things about the original description of Elasmosaurus platyurus is that Edward Drinker Cope, in his original description, mistakenly thought that the tail end of the animal was the neck and head end of the animal.

So he actually mounted the skull at the end of the tail and thought it was an animal with a short neck and a long tail.

And it wasn't until later that it was discovered by another paleontologist, Joseph Leidy, that the skull was on the wrong end and that it actually had a long neck and a short tail.

This is a postcard the Academy had made up that shows the original interpretation and then the revised interpretation.

So there's the head at the tail end, incorrect, and there's the head at the correct end.

The reason that Cope got that wrong was because Elasmosaurus platyurus was really the first plesiosaur with this dramatically long neck.

This wasn't a group that was known to have such a long neck.

At the time of discovery, Kansas wasn't a place where many fossils were being discovered.

Elasmosaurus platyurus is really considered to be the first major fossil discovery of Kansas, and it really changed the reputation of the area in terms of the productivity, the paleontological productivity of Kansas.

And so it brought a lot of attention to Kansas for the first time after this discovery.

Paleontology is still in a relatively kind of infant state at the time of this discovery.

Those that discovered it were not experts in the field, and they did the right thing in terms of passing this along to scientists who they thought could do a better job of describing what it is and helping to kind of place it into the field.

Also, they ended up donating the material.

It wasn't sold.

They didn't try to make money off of this.

It was donated to the Academy of Natural Sciences for study and for housing, and it remains here today.

So I think it's a it's just a great kind of story about what should be done when fossils are found in the field, make sure that they become accessible to scientists and also accessible to the public for future potential display.

The reason that the Academy of Natural Sciences chose elasmasaurus to be really the audience's introduction to the museum by mounting it from the ceiling in the lobby is because this is such an important part of the Academy's history.

This is one of the important discoveries that is connected to our institution.

It's an important early holotype in terms of understanding marine vertebrates at that time in the Cretaceous period, kind of part of our history.

It was important to make sure that it welcomes visitors to the museum.

We're so proud of Dr.

Turner and his contributions to the study of paleontology and his service here at the Fort.

And we couldn't be more thrilled than to have the casting of this dragon that he found and to have his figure sitting here with it every day.

And I love watching the visitors who come through and they're looking at the things they expect.

You know, there are Native American artifacts and there are artifacts from the soldiers here at the, who served here at the fort.

And then you come into this area and you see this beast who is as long as a semi-trailer.

And they're like, "What does this have to do with it?"

And again, it is a wonderful example of what these post surgeons were doing here.

They are not just doctors taking care of people.

They are the scientists on the ground.

We are so excited to have that multi-layer story represented here.

You know, we've got soldiers, we've got the Cheyennes and the Arapahos and we've got all these people.

But then we have this prehistoric story to tell as well.

And Dr.

Turner is where all that connects.

And we're just so proud to have a role in telling that.

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