Geology Corner: Oceans of Kansas

We went to Kansas yesterday to celebrate Thanksgiving with my mom.  The weather was beautiful and it was sunny, so in the afternoon, I took four of my kids and my oldest nephew on a fossil hunt.  We didn't end up where I'd hoped, but there was plenty to see in the place where we did stop to look around.  My rock hammers were at home and most of the fossils were embedded in limestone and chert, so it would have been too tricky to try to hammer them out anyway.

Since we couldn't collect them, we collected pictures of them.  And like all good geologists do, we put stuff in the pictures in for scale.  Yesterday, it was fingers: kids' fingers, Jeremy's fingers, my fingers. 

Like Nebraska, Kansas was covered by an interior seaway for much of the Cretaceous.  This is why there aren't dinosaur fossils in the central U.S.  There are sea creatures instead: Bryozoa, Trilobites (although rare), shells, coral, Brachiopods, Fusilinids, Crinoids, and a number of other things listed HERE.

It is easy to fossil hunt, and the kids get so excited about it.  There is much to find in Kansas, and I can't wait to go back ... with my rock hammers in tow.

All of the rocks here were coated with layers upon layers of these Fusilinids.  They're little tiny creatures about the size of a grain of rice; the fossils are abundant.  These are fossils of their tests, or shells.

Noah, my sister Brianna, Morgan, and Madeleine

My nephew Tre'mon

Jeremy swore this was a bird foot.  I hope he was teasing me, because I insisted that there were no birds in the bottom of the ocean in the Cretaceous period.

Crinoid

Bryozoa and coral

Bryozoa

The shell on the left is a fossil.  The snail shells were lying here and there among the rocks at the base of the hill.  The kids were more excited about these, I think, than finding the fossils, maybe because these fit in their pockets.  The boulders did not. 

Betcha didn't know we have seagulls in the midwest.