A map of Kansas showing the surface and sub-surface distribution of the remaining Cretaceous rocks (adapted from the Kansas Geological Survey Bulletin 162; 1963).  Although Kansas was once nearly covered with Cretaceous marine deposits, millions of  years of erosion have removed a large portion of them them from the surface, leaving many areas of chalk exposed along river valleys in the northwest portion of the State. Go here for more information on Kansas Geology.   KANSAS FOSSILS -  Kansas Geological Survey

This shallow ocean was home to a variety of marine animals, almost all of which are now extinct. These included giant clams, rudists, crinoids, squid, ammonites, numerous sharks and bony fish, turtles, plesiosaurs, mosasaurs , Pteranodons and even several species of marine (toothed) birds. Although it seems unlikely that you would find dinosaur fossils in the middle of the Western Interior Sea, a number of them (a hadrosaur found by O. C. Marsh in 1871, and several nodosaurs, including the type specimen of Niobrarasaurus coleii) have been collected from the Smoky Hill Chalk, and their remains have been well documented. The bodies of these dinosaurs must have somehow floated hundreds of miles into the sea before sinking to the bottom or being torn apart by scavenging sharks. It is possible that they died during catastrophic flooding on the land masses to the east or west, and were carried out to sea on a large, tangled mat of trees and other vegetation (fossilized wood, including large logs, is also known from the chalk).

Over a period of about five million of years, the remains of many of these animals were preserved as fossils in the soft, chalky mud of the sea bottom. When this mud was compressed under thousands of feet overlying shale, it became a deposit of chalk that is more than 600 feet thick in Western Kansas. Most of the massive chalk formation that once covered Kansas, however, has been eroded away over the last 60 million years and is now exposed only in a relatively small area in the northwestern corner of the State. This part of Kansas is also known as the Smoky Hills.

Since 1868 and the discovery of Tylosaurus proriger, the Smoky Hill Chalk has been the source of thousands of fossil specimens, many of which are on exhibit today in museums around the world. The first significant collections of Kansas fossils were made by relatively unknown scientists like Professor Benjamin F. Mudge, Dr. George M. Sternberg, Dr. John Janeway, and Dr. Theophilus H. Turner.  Many others  were collected by and for such famous paleontologists as Edward Drinker Cope, O. C. Marsh, Samuel W. Williston, and Charles Sternberg, (for more information on the Sternberg family, click here),  including a large portion of the Yale Peabody Museum collection that resulted from the Yale College Scientific Expeditions of the 1870s. For some 'old time' advice on collecting fossils, see an 1884 article by Charles H. Sternberg here. Much of the early work on mosasaurs in Kansas was published in The University Geological Survey of Kansas in the late 1890's.  A large number have been found since then by amateur collectors and many of these have been significant additions to paleontology.  The Sternberg Museum of Natural History at Fort Hays State University,  the Museum of Natural History at The University of Kansas, and the University of Nebraska State Museum have excellent collections of fossils from the Smoky Hill Chalk. The Denver Museum of Nature and Science, the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History in Norman, Oklahoma, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, and the American Museum of Natural History also have many Kansas fossils.  Click here for additional information about some early American paleontologists. 

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RECOMMENDED RECENT BOOKS ON PALEONTOLOGY

Oceans of Kansas is now available as a book.  The book describes the animals that lived in the shallow sea covering Kansas during the Late Cretaceous and left their remains as fossils in the Smoky Hill Chalk. "A journey to a time when sea monsters roamed the middle of America" Published by the Indiana University Press, Spring 2005

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King of the Crocodylians The Paleobiology of Deinosuchus David R. Schwimmer Published 2002 by the Indiana University Press, 220 pages

NEW!! A History of Paleontology Illustration Jane P. Davidson Published 2008 by the Indiana University Press, 217 pages