Sept/Oct 2006 The Science Pages Features

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Last winter, while traveling by train just south of the Arkansas River in Kansas, I was fortunate to observe one of the most scenic areas in the state. White-tailed deer and wild turkeys were numerous in the vegetated areas bordering the river. Except for the exclusion of the American bison, this area looked a lot like it did when the first settlers entered the state. Most students of natural history are familiar with the terrestrial plant and animal communities that were present on the Great Plains when this region was settled. Prairie grasses and herds of bison stretched as far as the eye could see. By the 1870s, the hide hunters and the cowboys had arrived, and the flora and fauna of the Great Plains was altered forever. The human history of this period is well-known. Most people know that Kansas was an "ocean of grass" before the introduction of modern agriculture in the state. What many people do not realize is that Kansas was covered by a shallow ocean for many millions of years. In his book, Oceans of Kansas, Michael Everhart introduces his readers to the creatures that flourished in this realm.

The shallow sea that covered Kansas and most of the interior of North America in the Cretaceous Period is known as the Western Interior Sea. The Cretaceous Period is the last geologic time period in the Mesozoic Era (the Mesozoic runs from roughly 250 million to 65 million years ago). During this period, dinosaurs dominated the terrestrial landscape.

Everhart devotes much of his book to a description of the history of the organisms that were preserved in the Smoky Hill Chalk geologic deposit, created when the sea was at its deepest and a chalky mud was deposited on the sea floor over a five-million-year time span between 87 ...