February/March 2002
(Volume 5, Number 4)

Kansans won't discover dinosaur bones--like the famous Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton nicknamed "Sue"--in our back yards. But we might find shark teeth! Stegosaurus, Triceratops, and other familiar dinosaurs lived at a time when Kansas was covered by a salt water sea.

For Parents and Teachers:

Kansas' geologic past -- as part of an inland sea--may seem prehistoric, but it still affects us today. With this issue we hope that readers will gain a better understanding of cause and effect in history. The rich farmland that makes Kansas an agricultural leader, and the jobs people have in Kansas oil fields, salt mines, and limestone quarries are a direct result of events in the Cretaceous Period, more than 65 million years ago. Just think how different life would be had Kansas never been underwater!.

Millions of years ago, the ground we now walk on was an ocean floor. Salt water covered Kansas, and the water was filled with huge fish, swimming birds, and reptiles. Gigantic meat-eaters called mosasaurs ruled the ocean. Some of them grew as long as the width of a basketball court. Fierce sharks like Megalodon grew just as long, weighed 50 tons, and had enormous mouths that opened eight feet high!

How to say...

It's probably a good thing that humans weren't around during the period when Kansas was covered by an ocean. May of the sea creatures would have found humans just another tasty morsel of food! Meet seven of them in this issue.

Visit these great area museums:

Kansas is no longer an ocean state full of huge, hungry sea creatures. 

For millions of years the Kansas ocean continually changed shape.  A change in the environment could dry up some of the water, or lock it into sheets of ice. Then more land would be exposed.Another climate change could melt the ice, or cause greater rainfall, and water would then cover the land once more. The Kansas sea shrank and grew many, many times.

Kansas is world-famous for the number and quality of its prehistoric fossils. A fossil is a leftover piece or a trace of something that lived in a past geologic age. A fossil could be the imprint of a leaf or bone pressed into rock. It could also be the ancient bone itself, or plant remains preserved as petroleum.

Mike Everhart is a marine biologist and paleontologist in Kansas. He looks for and studies fossils of prehistoric sea life. "Kansas is one of the best places in the world to find marine reptiles from the Cretaceous Period," he said. He loves "talking to people about these ancient marine reptiles and showing them that they were every bit as big and exciting as dinosaurs."

George Sternberg was only nine years old when he made his first important fossil discovery. He and his parents were camping in 1892 along the chalky cliffs in Logan County. Sternberg's father made his career finding fossils and selling them to museums all over the world. Young George liked to watch his father clean fossils in his laboratory. He went with him on fossil-hunting trips.

Many of the exciting underwater pictures in this magazine were painted by artist Dan Varner. Varner creates his pictures using oil paints on large canvasses. Varner talked to Kansas Kaleidoscope about his art from his home in New Jersey.

The ocean of the past is still all around us today in Kansas. Rock used for bulding stone, gravel, cement and ceramics formed in layers during the dinosaur age. Below these are much-older minerals such as salt, oil, natural gas, coal zinc and lead. We depend on the prehistoric remains of this ocean for food, plastics, building materials, and energy in our homes and autos.

Many houses, schools, churches and offices in Kansas were built of limestone. The State Capitol in Topeka and the Cathedral of the Plains in Victoria were each made of several million pounds of limestone quarried in Kansas.

At the end of the Paleozoic Era (more than 251 million years ago), oceans covering western and central Kansas left behind thick layers of salt. This large bed of salt was buried deep underground, and nobody knew that it was there. By accident, some oil drillers searching for gas and oil near Hutchinson in 1887 discovered the salt.

Petroleum products, such as oil and natural gas, were a major source of wealth for Kansas in the 20th century. More than 80 of the state's 105 counties had petroleum wells. The first oil well in Kansas was near Paola in the 1860s.

In the last issue of Kansas Kaleidoscope (volume 5, no. 3), our four adventurers asked a young African American girl in 1879 for help to return to their own time in the present day. Our series began when Gina and her cousin Max, his little sister Opal, and Opal's dog Marshmallow took shelter from a storm in their grandparents' barn. Lightning struck, and the kids were forced to escape through a hole in the barn wall. Once outside, they were shocked to find themselves face to face with Lewis and Clark! In Part 2, they traveled again through time and were befriended by a Kansas family in 1879. Part 3 ended as the children plunged into a river to try to rescue a run-away Marshmallow. Struggling in the swift current, all four sank underwater.

Write the next part of the adventure (under 500 words) and send it to Kansas Kaleidoscope with your name, age, address and phone number. We'll publish one student's writing in the next issue! Help us create new adventures--and follow these young explorers as they travel through Kansas history trying to get back home. Send your writing by April 15 to Kansas Kaleidoscope magazine, 6425 SW Sixth Ave., Topeka KS 66615-1009, or by e-mail to education@kshs.org