Figure 2 - uploaded by Michael J. Everhart
Content may be subject to copyright.
Map of western Kansas during the construction of the Kansas Pacific Railway (circa 1867- 1871). Open circles represent ghost town or other habitations that no longer exist.
Source publication
In the early history of paleontology in the United States, much of the attention (and notoriety) was centered around the two giants in the field, Othniel Charles Marsh of Yale College and Edward Drinker Cope of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Both of these men were certainly major contributors to the science of paleontology, but th...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... Founder: Webb had visited the area around Fort Hays, in Ellis County, Kansas three years earlier, in October, 1866, (Fig. 2), as part of an advance party seeking town sites ahead of the construction of the railroad. Cutler (1883) indicated that the party purchased three sections of land near the fort, but on the north side of Big Creek (a tributary of the Smoky Hill ...
Similar publications
Purpose: In this contribution, we want to detect the document type profiles of the three
prestigious journals Nature, Science, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of
the United States (PNAS) with regard to two levels: journal and country.
Design/methodology/approach: Using relative values based on fractional counting, we
investigate...
Citations
... In a final note, William Webb (1875) in Buffalo Land, his semi-fictional, autobiographical account of a 1868 hunting party in western Kansas, describes the discovery of a large fossil on the slopes of the volcano-like hill (Everhart 2016). That said, Webb's story may have some basis in personal accounts of the Elasmosaurus discovery that were still fresh in the minds of people living at that time around Fort Wallace or Sheridan, Kansas. ...
By the middle of the 19th century, loosely organized systems for networking had developed among East Coast American scientists. These networks were both formal, such as memberships in societies or museums, and informal groups of colleagues. Such professional associations helped to establish co-operation in field work, laboratory research, and publication which had a major impact on paleontology. These associations also helped to establish outlets for publication and to acquire government funding for research. Even during the Civil War years, these professional networks served to further science and the careers of a number of young scholars on their way up. Some of these activities were conducted under the auspices of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia; others were sponsored through the Federal Government via the United States National Museum (Smithsonian Institution). From these scientific networks, many of which were under the aegis of Joseph Leidy, came a large number of important contributions to Kansas paleontology. Several of these occurred shortly after the close of the Civil War and involved military doctors that were posted to newly established forts in western Kansas. Important discoveries including rich deposits of fossil leaves, type specimens of the marine reptiles including Elasmosaurus platyurus, Polycotylus latipinnis, Tylosaurus proriger, and the first known bird with teeth, Ichthyornis dispar, were made by individuals in Kansas with connections to professionals in the, by then, well-established network of Joseph Leidy.
Historians have long understood the American West as a region shaped by aridity. Yet, by analyzing the novel imaginaries that emerged from the scientific and commercial interaction with fossils and coal in the late nineteenth century, this article reveals that the discovery of lush and lively paleo-environments also significantly influenced the history of this region. The physical geography and remnant resources generated over the course of geologic time in the American West decisively influenced western settlement and the advancement of American science in the late nineteenth century. Through government reports, scientists breathed new life into the ancient denizens and environments of the West. Where their contemporaries often saw an eternal desert, many scientists saw a malleable and eve-revolving environment pregnant with potential. Boosters subsequently absorbed the authority of these scientific ideas to lend credence to their plans to remake the region into an agricultural paradise using capital and coal-fueled technology. In some ways anticipating modern attempts to restore landscapes to their pre-anthropogenic states, some boosters drew on these vibrant scientific images and narratives of lush paleo-environments to challenge the previously dominant perception of the American West as being arid and hostile to life. Scientific visions of formerly fertile lands were coupled with revolutionary coal-fueled technologies such as the transcontinental railroads, making vast human induced climatological changes an empowering possibility to a nation driven to colonize its frontier.
Mosasaurs were large marine lizards (Squamata:
Mosasauroidea) that inhabited the oceans of the
Earth during the last 35 million years of the Late
Cretaceous. Their remains have been collected
from Kansas since 1868 (Cope 1869; Everhart
2016) and are most common in the Smoky Hill
Chalk in the western half of the state. More
recently, the scattered remains of mosasaurs and
mosasauroids have been documented from older
stratigraphic units (Martin and Stewart 1977;
Everhart 2005b; Polcyn et al. 2008; Schumacher
2011; Everhart and Pearson, 2014). In June, 2016,
a mosasaur dorsal vertebra (FHSM VP-18916)
was collected by George Klein from the middle
portion of the Blue Hill Shale Member of the
Carlile Formation in Mitchell County, Kansas.
The discovery was witnessed by the author.
Although not the oldest example of a mosasaur in
Kansas (Everhart and Pearson 2014; FHSM VP-
17246), the vertebra represents only the second
unequivocal mosasaur specimen recovered from
the Blue Hill Shale. The stratigraphic occurrence
of two other “Blue Hill Shale” specimens (KUVP
27032, KUVP 97200) is likely, but uncertain.
