Road cut near Eudora, Kansas, just off Kansas Highway 10. | Photo by Jessica Johnson Webb
Roadtripper's magazine has a story about fossil hunting in Kansas. The article is a good summary of general areas. It mentions the Niobrara Chalk of western Kansas. This formation was laid down by the Western Interior Seaway (WIP), which covered the central US and extended from the Gulf of Mezico to the Arctic, during the Cretaceous about 80 million years ago. Of course, this happened before the building of the Rocky Mountains pushed up the central US. Shark teeth, bivalves, fish, and even huge Mosasaurs have been found. There is the famous "fish within a fish" fossil at the Charles Sternberg Museum in Hays, Kansas that you can visit. Also mentioned is eastern Kansas and its extensive Carboniferous and Permian deposits. Brachiopods, crinoids, bryozoans, and even trilobites are common. If you are really lucky, even plant fossils can possible. So, if you are in Kansas this sumer, bring along you favorite rock hammer and have a little fossil collecting fun!
Perhaps Kansas isn’t the first location you think of when imagining a battle between giant prehistoric sea creatures—but it should be.
As a child growing up in the Midwest, my grandparents showed me a small jar of shark teeth they’d collected at a quarry in a nearby farmer’s field. Looking across the gently rolling hills with the only water in sight in a small pond, it was hard to imagine giant marine predators swimming around our land-locked part of north central Kansas. But my grandfather told me that Kansas—along with much of the rest of the Midwest—used to be covered by a sea, millions of years ago.
That Cretaceous sea, also known as the Western Interior Seaway (WIS), covered much of the middle of North America about 80 million years ago. Plenty of gnarly creatures ate, fought, hunted, foraged, and died there, leaving their remains for fossil hunters to find millions of years later.
Those remains are strewn across the Niobrara chalk beds found in western Kansas, which are famous for their dramatic sea creatures, according to Rex Buchanan, director emeritus of the Kansas Geological Survey. “In any major museum in this time period, look at the marine Cretaceous stuff and it will be from Kansas,” he says. Some of those fossils came from professional fossil hunters and some from amateurs. The same thrill of the hunt that captured my grandparents’ imaginations has inspired Kansans for a long time.
