Of the many remarkable things happening in the Great Plains in the late 1800s.

One was the discovery of fossils that proved the interior of the United States had once been covered by a sea.

The work of one family and one man in particular was pivotal in understanding our landscape's ancient past.

So western Kansas in the late 1850s and early to mid 1860s was being well known because there were a lot of military engagements out here.

And so the military people, especially the post surgeons and some of the doctors had scientific training.

So that brought the Western third the state into light on what was really here.

And they were finding fossils.

Hi, my name is Ian Trevethan.

I am the Education Director here at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History.

When you talk about the Sternberg family in terms of impact on the Western United States and science, I think as we know it, it starts in Kansas and it starts post-Civil War.

Trying to figure out the Sternberg lineage does get confusing because the Sternberg's tend to name each other after one another.

So you have multiple Charles as you have multiple Georges and actually you have multiple Levis.

The best way to discern who you're talking about is to use their middle names.

So it starts with a guy called George Miller Sternberg, who was a medical doctor, and he was posted at several forts around the western interior after the Civil War.

Dr. Sternberg was stationed at Fort Harker, which is or was located in what is now Kannapolis, Kansas, in Ellsworth County.

One of the interesting things is post doctors and that's all of Sternberg's contemporaries at this time, in addition to dispensing medical duties on post, which is taking care of soldiers, doctoring, once those duties were done, their next primary duty was to sort of take stock of what natural resources were around.

So that includes looking at plants, looking at animals and cataloging those things, looking at the geology and those kinds of resources as well as meteorological data.

So George Miller Sternberg is now stationed at where Kannapolis, Kansas is now.

He was credited as actually being some of... the one of the first people to find some of the earliest vertebrate fossils.

So he found some of the first fish fossils, some of the first marine reptile fossils in this area.

He had some tumultuous times.

He was stationed there through an epidemic of cholera during which he lost his wife.

So it was pretty tough going for him.

But he apparently liked the area enough that he bought a plot of land and talked his father and several of his siblings into moving from New York to start a ranch in Kansas and Ellsworth County.

So that's really where the first chapter of the Sternbergs starts.

One of those siblings was his younger brother, Charles.

Now, Charles Sternberg is really, I think, the first fossil collector, I think, that that scholars tend to focus on.

He was very, very prolific, but he would not have gone on that route, I think, were it not for his brother.

He went on to work for both O. C. Marsh and Edy Cope.

He worked with both of those guys.

So Marsh and Cope were were the sort of prominent paleontologists and anatomists of their time of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

And they are famous for what is known as the Bone Wars, which is this competition between two contemporaries to find and name the most greatest, grandest fossil specimens coming out of the western interior of the United States.

They went on to sort of have what is equivalent to a feud where you have these two camps moving across the western United States, basically sniping with each other over the best fossil finds.

So there's a lot of sort of skullduggery happening.

But in spite of that, that's what's interesting about Charles Sternberg, is he managed to work with both with both camps and learn what he needed to learn and sort of rise above that.

Charles Sternberg then just goes on to sort of be the prolific fossil hunter of his time.

And eventually he had three sons and this is where it gets confusing.

So you have multiple Charles, you have multiple Georges.

George Fryer Sternberg is who would eventually become the curator of our institution here.

So you've got basically two generations worth of fossil finders and describers.

As far as the Sternberg family goes, they weren't formally trained, but they were still well-regarded.

You'd be hard pressed to walk into a museum, natural history museum in North America, probably the world, and not find some fossil that was found and delivered by one of the Sternberg's.

So George Fryer was hired by what would eventually become Fort Hays State University to basically start and and manage a fossil collection for study and display at the university.

And much of what's on display around here around our our main fossil gallery are specimens that were were excavated and prepped out by George Sternberg himself.

In his time, he collected many, many fossil specimens for many, many different institutions.

For us, I think the most prominent fossil that's on display here is a fossil called the Fish Within a Fish, which is a large fish called the Xiphactinus.

And inside of its gut is a smaller fish called a Gillicus.

And it's very, very well preserved.

We get inquiries about it from all over the world, all over the world.

The history of that fossil is very interesting.

It was discovered in the spring of 1952 by a field crew from, I believe it was the American Museum of Natural History.

It was then later excavated by Sternberg during the summer of 1952.

We've got a large mosasaur called a Tylosaurus.

The one that's on display in our main fossil gallery is about 30 feet long.

They did get bigger.

One of the other interesting specimens is an animal called Megacephalosaurus.

Megacephalosaurus is a larger bodied, short necked plesiosaur.

Megacephalosaurus literally means large headed reptile and it's...

If I were to stand its skull up from top to bottom and stand up, I would be about as tall as the skull.

It's about six feet long.

In terms of the Sternberg's and the fossil finding aspect and even the Bone Wars, what makes this area so unique is Kansas contains one of the best continuous sections of the Western Interior Seaway that existed in the late Cretaceous.

So where you've got a very, very unique feature in terms of an ocean that is sitting on top of a continent.

So you get this really, really well preserved record.

That unique feature of ancient Kansas continues to drive the research work of the Sternberg Museum today.

My name is Dr. Aly Baumgartner and I am the paleontology collections manager here at the Sternberg Museum.

The way the collection here works is we do have some things that are really targeted, you know, a specific locality that we're continuing, continuing to excavate.

But the vast majority of our collection is actually just landowners contacting us.

Hey, I found a thing.

Are you interested?

And then we will see if it's worth exploring.

And that's really fun.

You're kind of really building on to that Sternberg legacy.

You know, Sternberg was working with Kansans, right?

He was talking to people.

He had this good relationship with the community.

People have been coming to the museums, you know, as children, and they're excited to be able to bring the things that they have found so that they can bring their grandchildren to say, Hey, grandpa found that.

I love when people contact me to say my great grandpa donated something to the museum.

Do you still have it?

And the answer is typically yes.

And so I'll bring them in and show them yes.

This is the mammoth tooth that your great grandpa collected.

Throughout time Kansas has been has historically been exceedingly interesting.

So the fact that you know, the Western Interior Seaway, there used to be an ocean over Kansas, this inland sea that's full of all these sea monsters.

And then as you continue on, you have this period of time when Kansas was covered with basically a rainforest like this is amazing.

You continue on and you have this expansion of the grasslands that you see today, but not with the animals that you would expect to see today.

There were rhinos, there were elephant relatives.

It's amazing if you were to take a time machine and stand right here in Hays and go back in time, there would be mammoths in Kansas, there would be rhinos in Kansas, there would be saber tooth cats in Kansas.

And then at one point, you'd be underwater and you'd be in trouble.

But it's really cool just to think that we have history in our backyard here.

And it's amazing.

This is one of my favorite specimens in the museum.

So this is a ectenosaurus clidastoides.

It is a relatively small mosasaur from the Western Interior Seaway.

It's actually very rare.

George Sternberg was working with a museum in Germany and he excavated an ectenosaurus.

It is the Holotype, so the specimen that the species was named for and it was taken to Germany and then a handful of years later, George was excavating in the same area and found another one, a better one.

So during World War Two, the museum with the Holotype in Germany was bombed.

And so that was lost.

And so this very recently was assigned a neo type.

So neo type means that it is the new type, it is the replacement for the holotype that was lost, which is very exciting for us.

It's actually more complete than the Holotype was.

We have basically an entire skull and the front half of the animal.

There's also skin impressions which you don't get very often.

And so people come to to study it pretty frequently.

Let's go over there.

So if you want, you can follow me this way.

I want to show you drawer of rhino toes.

I swear it's more interesting than it sounds.

So this is one of my favorite random drawers in the collection.

I love bringing people over here to see this.

Oftentimes when you're doing vertebrate paleontology, you are at the whims of erosion.

Right?

So vertebrate paleontology prospecting involves a lot of like staring at your feet, hoping that you're going to recognize a bone.

But sometimes we get lucky and we work in quarries.

And when you're in a quarry, you already have a pretty good sense of the edges and you can just dig down.

But when you're in a quarry, you find a whole lot more material and you can start organizing it by element.

So all of these cabinets have rhino material and all of the toes ended up in here.

But once you have this sort of volume of information, then you can start doing asking interesting kinds of questions, like how many rhinos were there based on how many toes?

What does that mean for how many rhinos there are?

And also, what's the variation in size of these rhino toes?

It gives us a sense of the variation in size of the rhino.

So even just a drawer of rhino toes can give us so many answers to questions about the past of Kansas.

Who knew?

I love to tell the story of how I met this fossil.

So my first week as a paleontology collections manager, my job is to know where everything is.

And so the first week I was like, I should just start opening drawers to see what's in here.

I opened this drawer and came face to face with a fish face.

I love this fossil.

I show it to as many people as I can.

It's actually the Holotype been in beninogmeus elosensus.

I really enjoy fossils like this one that take no imagination.

You look at this and you know exactly what this fish look like.

At least the face part.

Because you can see the eyes in the mouth.

If I show you a rhino toe, it might be kind of hard to easily extrapolate that to the rest of a rhino, unless you've already seen a rhino.

Looking at a face like that, I know exactly what you look like.

One of the things I really like about our collection is how many random skulls we have out so that I can always illustrate what I'm talking about.

I like to bring students over and point at things.

This is a brontothere previously identified as monops.

Now it's Megacerops.

Brontothere means Thunder Beast, which is one of those fantastic names that you get in paleontology because they're built a lot like rhinos or maybe hippos, but they have very small little teeth.

So they lived during the Eocene, but that's before the spread of grasses in North America.

So they didn't have the big old teeth that you would need to be able to grind up grasses.

Instead, they have these really adorable small teeth because they're eating softer foods.

Through time we then see the rise and spread of rhinos in North America.

So we definitely don't have a native rhino here, rhinos here today.

But they used to be everywhere in the Miocene.

This is an example of teleosaurus, which was basically the potbellied rhino.

They weren't very tall.

They had pretty stocky legs.

They also didn't have horns.

So in many ways, their body shape is more like a hippo than you would expect of a rhino today.

So they have these big ol big old teeth for fighting.

They also have much taller teeth.

The reason for that is by the time rhinos come around, we do have that expansion of grasslands.

And so they need these taller teeth to be able to grind up grass.

So first we had our brontosaurus and then we moved on to rhinos.

And then even later on we had proboscis.

And so this one is actually from about the same time period as our friend, the Rhino.

So these are tusks.

This is actually one of our holotypes, and it is from a mud grubbing mastodon.

So the reason it's called that is because it had these very long, lower tusks in addition to its top tusks.

But proboscideans of all kinds are very common in Kansas in the fossil record.

Now, we don't have any.

But in the Miocene we had these different types of of Mastodon friends during the Pleistocene, during the Ice Age, we would have mammoths.

So the fact that we don't have proboscideans or mammoth relatives in Kansas today is actually more surprising than the fact that we had them previously because we had them for longer than we haven't.

The Sternberg family were basically just people who found cool rocks and wanted to see how far the rabbit hole went.

You know, they were not necessarily trained in this and that is something that literally anyone can still do today.

You can still go back.

The Sternberg family, you know, I feel like is a really good illustration of the fact that anyone can do this.

They it was a family thing.

They just passed it on to each other.

But they also got their community involved.

Like, I genuinely think that part of the reason we have such this positive relationship between paleontology and western Kansas is because of the Sternberg family being really welcoming to their neighbors and helping them find things, helping them excavate things and promising we will preserve this forever, so your family can see it too.

And I think it's fun that people can be a part of that.

That continued work of connecting people with the past is a central part of the Sternberg Museum.

Welcome to the Sternberg Museum of Natural History.

I'm Dr. Reese Barrick, and I'm the director of the museum.

And our mission is to really advance an understanding and an appreciation of natural history.

We really focus on the Great Plains, and we've got an abundance of natural history.

We're a center of herpetology, snakes and turtles and lizards.

And we've got all of the fossils of the Western Interior Seaway.

So it's just an amazing abundance of diversity of natural history.

We do a lot of fun things at the Sternberg Museum, and a lot of it really does tie back to George and how he built the museum, but extending to how we can keep the excitement going for paleontology.

One of those things is that we offer summer camps here at the Sternberg, and these summer camps are often centered around going out in the field with high school students or middle school students and teaching them how to do fieldwork and excavate fossils.

So we have a lot of kids from all over the world, all over the world, and a lot of Kansas kids learning about Kansas paleontology and digging up fossils.

And that's where a lot of our fossils that we are getting in the collection these days is from our summer camps.

We also like to put our fossils into new and interesting exhibits.

One of the things that is fun about fossils is that they relate to living animals.

So we have an exhibit here where I'm standing in front of which is called Bringing Fossils to Life, where we show off a lot of the fossils that we have, and we tie them to modern animals and talk about what are the connections next to me Here we've got Mosasaur and Mosasaurs are fascinating creatures.

They look like these giant lizards and they look like really kind of like giant komodo dragons, except that they lived in the ocean and swam around.

Interestingly enough, a lot of early paleontologists thought they were most closely related to snakes.

They were in a group called Pythonamorfa.

These giant Mosasaurs had a second row of teeth down the middle of their jaws, just like pythons.

But everything else about these guys looks like a monitor lizard.

So we have our monitor lizards over here.

We have Australian water monitors and water monitors are cool because they have a keel on their tail that helps them swim.

They spend a lot of time in the water.

Mosasaurs had a big keel on their tail to help them swim through the ocean.

We got some really cool tortoises.

We had giant tortoises in North America we've got the fossils of them.

You know, tortoises haven't changed a lot through time.

When you have a really cool evolutionary innovation like a shell that protects you from everything, then there's not a lot of other changes that need... that's a really successful thing.

And so we have examples of all this from the fossil record here in Kansas.

And we can tie it to animals from all over the world, and that really gives us some cool context globally with the center on Kansas.

And that's kind of what George always wanted.

He wanted a lot of his fossils in the schools around Kansas because he wanted kids to have the opportunity to see fossils and think about them as real animals living at different times and how those connections are made to the present.

The Sternberg's were a very, very unique group of people because they seemed to be very socially conscious people as well as very interested in the natural world.

And I think they were sort of civically minded as well, you know.

So to me it's sort of a template of the kind of citizens we should sort of strive to be in our own lives.

I love that we have the connection of Dr. Sternberg here in Kansas because he is an example of your everyman paleontologist.

Like, definitely when you think about like the bone wars and things like that, you have this perception of the gentleman naturalist, the, the, you know, buttoned up paleontologist who's really actually sending locals out into the field.

And that was very much not the Sternberg family, any of them, because there was a whole family of paleontologists.

And I, I think that's really valuable that having this relationship between the people and the past.

Any one of the Sternberg's, I think they had a very positive effect on their community.

I think they were driven by multiple things.

I think they were definitely faith driven.

I think they were curiosity driven.

It's fascinating to see the ways that paleontology has kind of evolved through time, that historically you do have these, you know, men of science who are doctors, lawyers, whatever.

They're here to do one thing.

But, you know, I'm not going to ignore the the rocks that are on the ground.

And I do think it's really interesting because when I'm reading the correspondence, when I'm reading what people had written in their diaries historically, they they are in the past, so they didn't have our hindsight.

And it's interesting because I don't think they realized how much they were changing our understanding of the world.

Often, I think in life you have to make choices of what you want to do with your life.

Right?

And one of the best chunks of advice I got was from my mom, who always told me to do what you are and to me, the Sternberg's were a really, really great example of just doing what you are, being what you are.

Reading Charles Hazelius' autobiography.

It just seemed like, you know, he tried for a while to sort of do the ranching thing, to try to help get his family established, but he was compelled to go out there and find fossils.

And I think that that is fantastic.

So having that legacy as part of the museum is incredibly valuable.

That means that, you know, in order to really honor the Sternberg name, we should be continuing and forging these relationships with our community because we wouldn't we literally wouldn't have a museum without relationships with local landowners.

You know, George wouldn't have been able to get the stuff.

We wouldn't have... we wouldn't have it now and it wouldn't continue on in the future.

And so having that really good relationship with your neighbors is how we're going to continue on in the future.