Book Review: Oceans of Kansas
By Michael J. Everhart
I started reading Michael J. Everhart’s Oceans of Kansas before I left for my Kansas-Colorado trip in late July and finally finished it last week . . . which is solely a comment on how little I read these days rather than a comment on Everhart’s excellent work. He makes the Western Interior Sea of the Cretaceous come alive: each chapter begins with a “day in the life” vignette focusing on one or more critters that will, in an episode of bad luck worthy of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, end with the often horrific demise of said critter(s). That demise, while very bad indeed for the beast(s) who suffered it, has proven to be a boon for the folks who, roughly 87 to 82 million years later, dug the remains out of the Kansas chalk to preserve and study.
If Everhart’s openings strike the skeptical reader as mere fanciful imaginings of a past that never was, their grounding in solid science becomes obvious when the page is turned. The author describes how the denizens of the Western Interior Sea and the coasts that contained it swam, flew, reproduced and ate based on a plethora of paleontological data, citing his sources and illustrating the text with numerous photos. Several of the specimens described/depicted in the book were found by Everhart himself or a member of the Everhart family, and many more are part of the collection at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Hays, Kansas, where Everhart has been a staff member for years.
Who ate what/whom is one of the most information-packed bits of biology. Teeth—which, happily for us fossil hunters, tend to fossilize well—tell us whether a critter crushed its dinner (like the fish Micropycnodon kansasensis [see its teeth in Figure 5.23 on page 137] or Ptychodus rugosus, a clam-eating shark [see its teeth in Figure 4.15 on page 84]), shredded it with nightmare-inducing knife-like precision (like Cretoxyrhina mantelli, the “ginsu shark,” whose bitemarks on three mosasaur vertebrae demonstrate how that unfortunate critter met its end [Figure 4.1 on page 64]), or swallowed it whole and dragged it down its maw (a strategy that didn’t work out very well for a Xipphactinus audax that possibly choked to death on a Gillicus arcuatus it consumed shortly before its death [see pp. 98-99 for a photo of the Sternberg’s famous “fish-within-a-fish” fossil]). Some fossil bones show evidence of partial digestion in predators’ bellies, such as the nine caudal vertebrae of a hadrosaur in Figure 12.7 (page 338). The hadrosaur was likely scavenged by sharks after it died on land and its corpse floated out to sea (there were no dinosaurs in the Western Interior Sea, so any dinosaur remains found here originated on land and somehow made their way into the waters). Apparently, the shark didn’t find dino tail to his taste; since the fossil shows only some evidence of digestion, he likely barfed it back out, and the bones fell to the seafloor where Everhart found them, some 85 million years later, in Gove County, Kansas. Rocks are a slightly weirder thing to swallow, but plesiosaur remains are frequently found with gastroliths (i.e., stomach stones; see pages 171, 176, 188 and 190 for pics), which the animals apparently used either to control buoyancy or grind up prey for digestion or both or neither. An animal’s eating habits also give great clues as to the critter’s anatomy and musculature that assist paleontologists in reconstructing it, especially when remains are partial. If we know what it ate, how it ate it and the relative size of predator to prey, we can combine this knowledge with other clues from the fossils (such as connection points for muscles, ligaments and tendons) to generate a picture of the animal and its environment.
Of course, unless we go all H.G. Wells and invent a time machine, that picture is forever incomplete and is, as good science requires, open to revision as new evidence is found. The text I am reviewing here is the 2017 second edition of Oceans of Kansas, published 12 years after the first edition. As Everhart notes in his preface to the second edition, “many new discoveries have occurred in the Smoky Hill Chalk and other rocks deposited by the Western Interior Sea” (xi), and his research into the history of paleontology in this region continued during the interim as well. The context of the science is as much a focus as its content for Everhart, and he devotes a significant portion of each chapter to how, where and by whom the fossils were discovered and analyzed. Kansas was the wellspring for many skirmishes in the Bone Wars between late-19th-century paleontological giants E.D. Cope and O.C. Marsh, whose battles over specimens and interpretations of those specimens advanced our understanding of the past while generating enough action and intrigue to pack a multi-part Netflix series (e.g., dynamiting known fossil outcrops at the end of the season so the other side couldn’t collect there; it’s not exactly Indy and the Nazis, but it’s pretty wild . . . and shitty). Happily, however, the tenor of most collection in the region has not been the paleontological equivalent of Bloody Kansas but instead has been a practice fed by curiosity and conservation. From Kansas paleontological dynasties such as the Sternbergs and the Bonners to contemporary collectors and scholars such as Donald E. Hattin, Ken Carpenter, Kenshu Shimada, Keith Ewell and Everhart himself, the Cretaceous past continues to come to light. Standing in the blazing late July sun amid the Niobrara Chalk towers of Monument Rocks, it was almost impossible to picture myself at the bottom of the sea. And yet . . . with the crunch of giant clam shells (Playceramus platinus) beneath my boots and the first few chapters of Oceans of Kansas in my head, the sky was a-swim with schools of ancient fish pursued by hungry ginsu sharks and—yikes!—a mosasaur making a beeline for me. Thanks to Mr. Everhart for the scene, and thanks to time for the 85 million years between me and those teeth.
Visit the Oceans of Kansas web site