Monday, October 22, 2007
Lions and tigers and bears, and mastodons and meteors and moose! Oh my!
Sofia Dominguez, 7-year-old Lawrence resident, explores Kansas plant fossils in Dyche Hall. The Natural History Museum presented the exhibit What on Earth? Fossils, Rocks and Meteorites Sunday afternoon.
The University of Kansas Natural History Museum invited the public to bring in their own archeological finds for examination Sunday.
“What on Earth? Rocks, Fossils and Meteorites” gave visitors a chance to show off their own discoveries while they browsed other finds on display at the museum. Some displays included fossils of extinct bears, large cats and fossils of “sea monsters,” dinosaurs that swam through Kansas when it was under water millions of years ago.
Ali Nabavizadeh, Olathe junior, helped examine objects at the vertebrate table. He said most of the objects brought in that afternoon were run-of-the-mill, with one exception.
“We’ve had a lot of moose bones come in and lots of bison bones,” he said. “But one guy brought in a mastodon tibia.”
According to the Illinois State Museum Web site, the mastodon was an elephant-like animal that often reached 10 feet tall and weighed four to six tons. It roamed parts of North America until its extinction 11,000 years ago. The mastodon tibia brought in Sunday was found in the Kansas River.
Most of the fossils had been discovered in or along the banks of the Kansas River. Dan Williams, Cartersville, Ga., graduate student, said the river contained more ancient fossils than many people realized.
“It is a great concentrator of bones,” he said.
Williams was on hand to examine a fossil brought in by Lawrence resident David Unekis. Unekis said his wife found the dark brown, circular bone along the Kansas River during a canoe trip ten years ago.
“We’ve found cow bones and stuff like that before, but now they’re telling us this came from an extinct moose,” Unekis said.
The fossil had distinct markings that led Williams to identify it as part of a stag-moose skull. The now extinct stag-moose resembled a cross between an elk and moose but with complex antlers.
Several visitors brought in what they assumed were meteorites. Randall Van Schmus, retired KU professor of geology, said most of the objects visitors thought were meteorites were actually pieces of iron ore and other industrial metals.
“We’ve got a lot of junk,” he said.
He said one person did bring in a possible meteorite.
“Most of the time people think they have a meteorite, 98 percent of them are wrong,” he said. “I’m 99 percent sure I did find one meteorite today.”
He said the meteorite had been in the finder’s family for generations.
Van Schmus said that in 40 years of examining such objects, he had found only four authentic meteorites.
“One a decade, that’s about par for the course,” he said with a laugh.
— Edited by Luke Morris
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