Have you ever hunted for fossils? They can be hard to find. But a new book may be able to help. The 2nd edition of Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway has just been published and Commentator Rex Buchanan says it's worth checking out.
(Transcript)
One Saturday when we were kids growing up in central Kansas, word spread among my cousins that our dads were gonna take us to the western Kansas chalk beds to collect fossils. That trip never happened. Probably one reason was that our fathers had no idea where to take us.
If you’re in that situation, you might want to look at a new edition of a book called Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway by Kirk Johnson and Ray Troll, published by Chicago Review Press. Johnson is the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, though he was at the Denver Museum of Science and Nature when the first edition of this book was written. Ray Troll is an artist who went to Bethany College in Lindsborg. In the interest of full disclosure, I know Kirk Johnson some and I’ve met Ray Troll.
I’m not sure how the first edition of this book got past me, but it did. Which is too bad. Because Johnson does a great job of not only explicating fossils and where they’re found. He explains basic geologic concepts clearly and entertainingly, with great analogies, like the comparison of stratigraphic layers to pancakes. Troll’s illustrations make you look forward to turning every page.
Their message? Fossils are everywhere. You just have to know where to look and what to look for. Mostly they look out west, especially Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah, and Montana. Johnson specializes in fossil plants, but they find dinosaur tracks, giant clams, fish, turtles, even alligators. They visit famous fossil quarries. They hit seemingly every rock shop and museum in the west. Troll’s maps help pinpoint the location of their escapades.
Like many geologists, they’re also highly interested in the closest beer joint, chicken-fried steak, or Mexican restaurant. And Johnson seems to know every paleontologist worth knowing. He nerd name-drops shamelessly.
There’s not a huge amount about Kansas in this book, though they do give a shout-out to Chuck Bonner and Barbara Shelton who run the Keystone Gallery, an art gallery and fossil museum south of Oakley. And they mention KU paleontologists Larry Martin and Dick Robeson. Troll has drawn lots of images of animals, especially fish, that swam the Cretaceous sea that covered western Kansas and left the chalk behind.
Their message, that fossils are everywhere, is just as true in Kansas as in the Rockies. Not only do we have the chalk beds and good museums like the Sternberg in Hays and the KU Natural History Museum here in Lawrence, but invertebrate fossils, like corals and clams and crinoids, are all over the place.
All it takes is a little information, much of which is available from the Kansas Geological Survey here at KU where I used to work, and from books like this one. In fact, if all that info had been available back when I was a kid, maybe our folks would’ve gotten us to those chalk beds. ####
Commentator Rex Buchanan is a writer, author and director emeritus of the Kansas Geological Survey. He lives in Lawrence. Buchanan is the co-author of Petroglyphs of the Smoky Hills and Roadside Kansas and the editor of Kansas Geology.
