In 1890, fossil hunter Charles H. Sternberg — a little man with a high forehead and kind, close-set eyes — knelt alone atop a chalk outcrop in Western Kansas, and, with his pick and his brush and with the fervor of man who’d been fossil-crazy since he’d arrived in the area from New York State as a boy of just 17, unearthed, vertebrae by vertebrae, the skeleton of a great prehistoric shark.
But it wasn’t just any shark. What the 40-year-old Sternberg uncovered was the King Kong of ancient sharks, Cretoxyrhina mantelli, the “Ginsu shark.”
Cretoxyrhina (creh-TOX-see-RYE-nah), which frequently grew to lengths of 25 feet and weighed close to 2,000 pounds, stalked the waters of the Western Interior Sea between 80 and 100 million years ago. Its rows of razor-sharp teeth and the bone-crunching power of its jaws made it one of the most formidable predators in an underwater ecosystem chock-full of formidable predators.
For millions of years, current-day Kansas was just another drenched patch of seabed below the Mesozoic water-route that stretched from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf of Mexico.
The brackish waters that churned above the Great Plains pullulated with exotic sealife. Giant clams. Giant squids. Giant turtles. A miscellany of ancient sharks. An aggressive 20-foot-long fang-toothed fish, Xiphactinus, whose upturned jaw lent it the look of a bulldog. And then, of course, there were the enormous marine reptiles — the long-necked plesiosaur, say, or the mosasaur, whose sleek body and deadly jaws gave it the hybrid appearance of a shark crossed with a T. rex. Pteranodons, with their long beaks, anvil-shaped heads and bony wings, skimmed the surface of the ocean in search of fish, and counted, among their competition in the food chain, several species of marine birds whose beaks were pebbled with rows of teeth.
This is to say nothing of the land bordering the inland sea, where dinosaurs, mastodons, short-limbed rhinoceri, saber-toothed tigers, and deers that were barely 12-inches tall moved through forests thick with ferns and conifers and the era’s other immense variety of flora.
But then, like that — which is to say over the course of many millions of years — the land beneath the Western Interior Sea lifted, and the ocean receded to its present shorelines.
Early on in his memoir, “Life of a Fossil Hunter” (1909), Sternberg casts his fancy back to the ecological Xanadu that once lay across the great Midwest.
“How often in imagination I have rolled back the years and pictured central Kansas, now raised two thousand feet above the sea, as a group of islands scattered about in a semi-tropical sea! There are no frosts and few insect pests to mar the foliage of the great forests that grow along its shores, and the ripe leaves fall gently into the sand, to be covered up by an incoming tide and to form impressions and counterparts of themselves as perfect as if a Divine hand had stamped them in yielding wax.”
AND THE WAX, 125 years after Sternberg made his big find, is still yielding. “In fact, because so much stuff, even today, comes out of Kansas, it’s hard to keep up on the latest fossil findings,” said Ian Trevethan, a paleontologist from Fort Hays State University’s Sternberg Museum of Natural History, who was in Iola earlier this week as part of SAFE BASE’s third annual Shark Week. “The really cool thing about our state is that we have lots of fossils from all different ages. We actually have one of the best continuous rock units that yields that kind of material.”
Once again, USD 257’s enterprising afterschool program is educating and entertaining its charges with a menu of “fin-tastic” festivities, which will continue through the first part of next week.
The focus this year? Prehistoric sharks.
And if there is a single mascot for Shark Week, it is Sternberg’s Cretoxyrhina, a lifesize drawing of which hangs in the Jefferson Elementary School gym.
ON WEDNESDAY, Trevethan addressed a roomful of SAFE BASE kids. The students, many as young as five or six, crowded into the Iola High School lecture hall to listen to the scientist speak.
Trevethan, whose research focus is the isotopic analysis of core body temperature in mosasaurs and the significance of cranial variations in dinosaurs, toned it down for the kindergarten set.
“One thing that a paleontologist has to think about is time,” Trevethan told the students. “Have you ever thought about time?”
