You never know what you might find in western Kansas.

In Morland there is a fascinating relief created from clay brick on the front of a downtown building.

This three dimensional mural depicting prehistoric animals tells a larger story about the mysteries to be uncovered right in our own backyard.

We never know what's lying around in the soil in Kansas, we only see parts of it, and all the regions are a little bit different.

And paleontology is a study of ancient life.

And there are paleontological sites in Kansas of course, the chalk beds in northwestern Kansas and western Kansas are very famous for stuff from millions of years ago.

But were are a lot of animals after the Cretaceous period when we talk about the mosasaurs and stuff in the chalk beds.

As time changed and the sea left, this became various climates all the time.

And so there's one time when it was kind of a subtropical savannah out in this area.

So a land that's now semi-arid had palm trees in it.

Tall grasses and a lot of different species of animals that we don't see anymore.

The fossil quarry site, as it's known as a paleontological site that was actually discovered by a kid in 4H.

So he wasn't out of high school yet basically.

He had a project and his project was either dealing with rocks or maybe collecting fossils, and he had found some articles and had completed this project and it went through all of the judging and stuff for the county and district levels and stuff and made it to the State Fair in Hutchinson, Kansas.

And so it was there to my understanding that a trained paleontologist recognized these fossil things that this young man had collected.

I'm Dr. Reece Barrick, director of the Sternberg Museum of Natural History.

And the Minium Quarry is really one of the most famous quarries of Miocene age in the state of Kansas and really provided some spectacular fossils of Miocene age, including rhinos and camels, some carnivores and most interestingly, some plants and a lot of plant seeds.

And one of the really fascinating things is that most fossil quarries either have bones or they have plants, but they almost never have both, because the conditions for for fossilization generally exclude one or the other.

And so this is a very unique place which gives us a really in-depth, spectacular look at the ecology of the animals and of the area of western Kansas eight to ten million years ago.

People had been starting to find some bones there.

And of course, when people want to figure out what it is that they found in western Kansas, they bring the bones eventually end up at the Sternberg Museum so that the paleontologists here can identify them.

And when they were brought in, they were recognized as, OK, these, this is pretty interesting because there's been... there was a big Miocene quarry that George Sternberg had had discovered further south called the Swazi quarry that had just a bunch of Teleoceras, which is the rhinos.

And there were some bones that looked just like the Swazi quarry bones.

And so they knew it was going to be a Miocene age, probably.

And there were some rhinos in it, and it was kind of really interesting because it was a completely different area.

And so that developed into, uh, full scale paleontological investigations, even in a class that National Geographic sponsored it through Fort Hays State University and had chosen Dr. Joe Thomasson who was on the staff of Fort Hays State University as a botanist.

And they chose the right person with Joe Thomasson because Joe Thomasson found all these incredible seeds and stuff and plant material where this bone was found.

But also a lot of bones, too.

It was intensely dug for a couple of years and all that was being excavated, but it was determined to be the most important paleontological site in the world at that time being excavated.

Dr. Zachefsky and Dr. Thomasson went out to explore and talk with the Miniums and found that, wow, this is really going to be a pretty significant site.

Fort Hays sort of started some excavations and started finding lots of different bones.

The Miniums really wanted the bones to be able to go someplace where they could be researched.

But because it was so well known, there were people that would come all the time when there was nobody else around, and they'd be picking through the bones and finding things for themselves and hauling them off.

Eventually, Mrs. Minium you know, convinced Pete that maybe we should actually donate this property to Fort Hays so that they can sort of take charge of it and be responsible and try to excavate the bones and know that they're going to go someplace where they can really be studied and do some good.

I'm Dr. Laura Wilson.

I'm the curator of paleontology and chief curator here at the Sternberg Museum.

And we're a really unique resource within this area looking at the zoological and paleontological history of this of this area.

And so the paleontology collection here where we are really focuses on the the fossils that we find within this region and the state specific.

So we're very well known for our late Cretaceous.

So 100 to 66 million year old fossils when Kansas was covered by an ocean.

So big fish and sea turtles and other types of marine reptiles.

And we have the kind of more recent Ice Age fossils, so the mammoths and the mastodons and giant sloths.

And then we also have about eight, 7-8 million years ago, grasslands were really starting to spread across central North America, kind of us evolving into this ecosystem that we have today, this grassland ecosystem of the Midwest.

And so we have great plant and animal fossils representing that transition as climate was drying out and cooling.

And we see the evolution of rhinoceros and horses and camels, which is really interesting because they're all animals that are are extinct natively in North America now, but actually got their start here back over the last couple 10 million years.

One of the great resources that we have to show this transitional grasslands ecosystem is the Minium Quarry.

So they found a lot of creatures.

And in in the background of me, you see, we have tall camels.

We have kind of elk looking deer, we have bone crushing dogs and small rhinoceros.

So these are just some of the examples of what we have, mostly rhinoceros material that we do have a lot of other material as well.

So these are some of our rhinos.

The genus name is Teleoceras.

So this is the lower jaw of a fossil rhinoceros.

So these were tusked and we can actually tell male from female based on the size of the tusk.

But you can see it still has some of the the teeth in place.

And these are some of the limb bones.

This is actually a humorous the upper arm bone of a rhinoceros.

They were actually built kind of like hippos and that they had kind of shorter, stubbier legs, very barrel chested.

So the proportions are a little bit different than things like the white or black rhinos that we might be more familiar with.

And this is where it's really important for sites like this that have multiple individuals within the same deposit.

I mean, any sort of biologist or paleontologist doesn't want to just study one fossil or one animal and think that they know everything about that species from one individual.

So we try to make sure we're collecting multiple individuals so we have a better sense of the species as a whole.

And so these are all toe bones.

So lots of examples and these come from different parts of the hand or foot, but also different individuals.

So we can look at kind of different shapes and sizes Sometimes that can relate to juveniles versus of adults.

It might relate to male versus female, but all things that if we have enough samples, we can start answering those questions.

And so, yeah, you see this, you see the elephant looking things are kind of a mastodon thing with a long lower jaw and short tusks.

To the far is the camel.

And then we see some early horses.

Horses were really evolved in the Americas.

Most people think that the horse didn't come into America until the Spanish came in and came into Mexico and and the horses came up here.

But the horses actually developed here.

We have no mammoth or mastodon or elephants in North America that evolved here, that survived.

And neither did the horse.

But then it came back.

The same thing with the camel.

When we see here about camels here in Kansas, where that kind of raised some eyebrows.

But they were here, they were tall.

They were as much as 17 feet tall, they said, from the ground to the top of their head.

And you see the camel in a depiction.

So this is some of our camel material that we get out of the quarry.

A great example here of the lower foot of camel.

This is actually very indicative of a camel, since camels have two toes that actually spread out for soft sand.

So they have this split kind of fingers or toes that come off of there.

The shoulder blade.

So the scapula of a camel.

Were there any camels left in the Americas?

There are, because the llama or llama, and alpaka in South America or camel-lodes so they are the descendant, evolved from the camels in North America, And I think that's one of the things that does make the Minium Quarry more unique than other similar sites is that we do get a broader diversity of types of animals.

So not all big things, but little tiny bones.

So this is actually a little tiny rodent hip bone.

Another thing that's really unique about this site is the type of data that we collect.

We take the location of where each of these fossils was found within the quarry itself, within the deposit.

So we have three dimensional data of all of these different fossils that we can eventually put together to look at the distribution of elements, size, distribution, type of animal distribution.

That really helps us put together the picture of how this deposit came to be.

But these are some leg bones of a bird that we found, and this is a grebe.

we can also use the types of animals or types of plants that are found to help better understand this ecosystem as well.

So something like a grebe, which is a water bird, tells us that water played an important part within this ecosystem and within this environment.

Very cool little things that typically don't get fossilized very well because they're very hollow and fragile.

And so these are the types of fossils that we find.

So they might not always be the prettiest or most complete, but they still give us a lot of information about the animals themselves, as well as how that deposit came to be.

but also with the fossilized botanical material or the plant remains one specimen they had that was turned out to be palm.

They found such things as rice grasses.

And then also finding a lot of plant fossils, which is really unique.

So out of this site, we actually have one of the best fossil seed... fossil grass seed collections in the world because of the site and the type of preservation it is.

When it was first discovered that there were these really rare, really fragile plant seeds and grass seeds within the quarry, that kind of changed how the the quarrying process progressed.

And one of the things that the researchers started doing was actually taking the sediment so that they could sive gently and they weren't just kind of discarding all of the dirt without looking through it.

And this way they could sift through it and look for these very fragile, very tiny seeds and not things that we're always used to looking for and finding within deposits, especially those of us who might be looking specifically for bones and teeth, might not think to look for things like this.

So it was really important when the quarry was first opened in the eighties and nineties that we had botanists, paleo botanists and vertebrate paleontologists all working together to preserve as much data and as much of the fossil history of the site as possible.

They worked and actually had lots of volunteers.

It was sort of a pretty famous place, and there was people that came from all over to sit and watch and and see what was being discovered at the quarry.

As I say, Dr. Joe Thommason was the director or the principal investigator of the paleontological dig, but it Morland being a small community he took a lot of volunteers.

Charlotte Keith was a volunteer and worked the two years they were on it, and that is her depicted holding the jaw of a mammal.

Charlotte's personal records of photos and articles about the quarry were an invaluable resource for this episode.

And there's other people, younger people like Jade Heskett.

I'm Jade Haskett.

I grew up in Morland, Kansas.

I guess somehow my dad talked to the Miniums that found this.

I was kind into that, you know, that stuff, skull and bones, you know, typical fifth grade kid, I guess, dinosaurs and....

He said, Yeah, you should take your kid out there and let him, you know, check it out.

So my dad took me out there and we we found a few things and yeah, I mean, we did a lot of that.

We'd go out looking for shark's teeth, you know, around Hill City and stuff.

And my dad found a prehistoric bison skull along the riverbed.

We were always doing stuff like that, you know?

So when that when they decided to have a dig site there, like my dad talked to the Professor Thomasson and I was kind of invited to come out and check it out.

So, I mean, the whole dig site, it was, you know, cordoned off in a little one foot sections so you'd get a section to work on all day.

And and then like a lot of the stuff, we had to save the dirt into a bucket, because then they'd float it in the water.

Because the big thing that Thomasson was interested in was the the seeds and everything.

You know, there's like petrified Hackberry seeds and different types of, you know, I think bamboo, I guess that was a pretty rare find, you know, to to have them in that good of shape.

It was neat to get to be involved, you know, for a few days to go out there and and be with these paleontologists.

We found a three toed horse hoof.

My dad had this big thick zoology book from college when he was in college there.

So that was like...

I was always thumbing through that book as a kid, you know.

So it had those species or, you know, the different evolution of the horse and the rhino and all that stuff in there.

So, you know, that's pretty cool to say, Oh yeah, we got one of those.

There was discussions on how to develop the site as a as a tourist attraction.

That unfortunately didn't happen.

But there was a lot of bones and plants that were removed and there were several master's thesis that were written.

Then it sat for quite a while and there weren't a lot of things that were had been worked on for probably a dozen years.

And when I came here, Dr. Thomasson and I went out, visited the quarry, looked at all the possibilities of things that could be done.

And I thought, there is no better place to be able to take high school students, to introduce them to field work in paleontology as well as then be able to gain more resources for the museum than to take them out to the Minium Quarry so that they could be able to excavate, learn how to excavate vertebrate fossils, become paleontologists, and bring those bones back into the museum.

So we would find out, you know, any new things that might pop up out there.

I had hired a young man named David Levering to run our educational programs and start summer field camps for high school students.

My name's David Levering.

I am the science camp's director here at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History.

I most of my job involves working with middle and high school students in field settings.

We do some classroom stuff as well during the summers, and one of the areas that we use a lot in these programs is the Minium Quarry site.

Minium is a really great place for us to run these education programs and it has a lot of material there that's very easy for the students to find.

My name's Katie.

I'm a sophomore at Fort Hays State University, studying geology with a focus in paleo and general biology.

I started with the Sternberg at age 11.

I think it was the field paleontology camp.

Actually, that's where I started.

Minium was one of the first field sites I'd ever been to.

It was the first that I saw fossil mammal material.

It was the first that I actually got to excavate things out of the ground.

A lot of it is rhinoceros.

Especially from students when I tell them what's out there, that's really a big shock.

They don't think of Kansas as having rhinoceros or camels or things like that.

Just things that you don't really expect to hear from a western Kansas locality.

Minium Quarry is really valuable for our understanding of the regional climate history, biotic history, history of the animals that used to live here, which tells us a lot about what this area used to be able to support.

The fact that it used to be able to support herds of rhinos, prehistoric horses and camels which is not really similar to anything we see out here now.

Better understanding that site can really help us better understand where this region has been as well as where it could be going, depending on things like climate fluctuations.

This specific site in the Miocene was a marshland sort of thing, so it would have served as a watering hole kind of environment where everything was just right there at one time.

A lot of the material we find is pretty well intact, at least to an extent that we can tell usually what animal it came from.

Something big, something bulky or something really, really small.

This past field season, we actually pulled out some mice jaw that were no more than an inch long.

It's just a really good opportunity for kids to see the diversity that comes out of the Kansas fossil record.

It gives us an opportunity to teach them quarry skills.

We've also this past year reopened the quarry from scratch.

So we've been able to teach them how to map, how to properly work down a quarry, document the information that comes out of it.

We find a lot of the big stuff because it's big and it's easy to spot, but we find smaller things too, which is really important for getting a complete snapshot of the of the biology and the ecology of this region when that was an active living system.

If you're having to kind of piece together a picture and all you have are like plants here and then a few fossils here and a few fossils here.

That's a great like you can you can kind of stitch things together.

We do that in paleontology all the time, but having everything in one place is, as you might imagine, a lot better.

The quarry was originally opened in the 1980s, and to this day we're still able to pull new information out of it, whether it's from a student perspective or I actually have a friend who's a grad student who did her thesis on Minium and the environment that it was.

We're still getting very new, very exciting information from a quarry that was opened years ago.

The Minium Quarry, when it was donated to Fort Hays State University, became a resource really unlike any other to educate young people, students, bring resources in that we can then use to train paleontologists at the university, as well as used to educate kids at school tours and create exhibits for everyone to understand more about the history of Western Kansas.

Because our our mission is to develop an appreciation of the natural history, especially of the Great Plains.

For the past year or so we've had a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services specifically focusing on the preservation of the fossils from the Minium Quarry.

And we've been taking care of the data the first year, and now that we've moved into the second year of the project, we're taking care of the fossils themselves and rehousing them in archival boxes with archival material.

So there's no outgassing of acids that can deteriorate the bones further and then making special types of, we call them cavity mounts that fully support the fossils and just that's for the long term preservation to make sure that the fossils stay as safe and as whole as possible for future research, for future education.

If we want to build exhibits and things like that.

Even if it just slightly sparks your interest.

I've had kids come in where they've never once thought that this could be something they would go into and they go to a week long indoor camp with the prep lab or they go out in the field with us and it changes their whole path.

That's sort of what happened to me.

I started doing these camps.

I was like, Oh, this is just an interest.

And lo and behold, I ended up making a career out of it.

Even the things that you think are hobby material can be something that changes your pathway.

So I guess it's something that's kind of stuck with me through my life.

Found out about this gravel biking where it's basically a road bike that's set up, you know, to ride on dirt.

And like when I'm on my bike, when I drive through these, you know, gullies or whatever, dirt roads it's I'm always keeping an eye out for a bone or something sticking out.

Look around.

Be aware of what's out there because we're walking over and building over a whole lot of pre-history that's below us that we do not understand.

Keep your eyes open?

Keep your eyes open.

You never know what you could find lying on side of the road or sticking out of one of the one of the banks that the roads are cut through.

So wildlife, coyotes, deer, turkey.

Or a prehistoric animal.

Yeah.

Or, you know a mammoth.