A moving portrait of a self-taught paleontologist and the family who shared his lifelong pursuit of fossils, set against the vast Kansas chalk beds.

Both personal and scientific, the book captures the spirit of discovery and the quiet persistence of those who search the past to understand the world.

Melanie Bonner Thomas is a writer and editor based in Texas. Drawing from family history and a lifelong connection to paleontology, she brings together narrative, science, and memory in her work.

• Part I – Bedrock
• Plains Vision
• Kansas Immigrants
• Fish Catches Boy
• Boy Meets Girl
• Dust Bowl Survival


• Part II – Family
• Fish Tales
• Old Man of the Army
• Theater Operations
• Digging the Dirt


• Part III – Museums
• Grand Man
• Rare Friendship
• History Lessons
• California Connection
• Storms and Sadness


• Part IV – Legacy
• My Muse
• Institutional Knowledge
• Mystery Fish
• The Fossil Record
• End of an Era


• Kansas Cretaceous Marine Life
• Museums with Bonner Fossils

Fossils of the Rock Chalk is a time-machine cruise on a prehistoric ocean inhabited by astonishing fish, reptiles, and birds that lived there for more than thirty million years before vanishing with the dinosaurs. Sign up for the expedition when you turn page one and you’ll never want to get off the boat.
— Brad Matsen, author, with artist Ray Troll, of Planet Ocean: A Story of Life, the Sea, and Dancing to the Fossil Record.

A handy guide to chalk-bed fossils and the animals that gave rise to them, written and illustrated by members of one of the premier fossil-collecting families of western Kansas. Take it along the next time you head out.
— Rex Buchanan, editor, Kansas Geology: An Introduction to Landscapes, Rocks, Minerals, and Fossils

Melanie Bonner Thomas, a Kansas native, spent most of her career as an editor and writer in Austin, Texas, and currently lives in New Orleans. She has written biographies of famous people for young readers, as well as magazine articles on paleontology, archeology, and history for Texas Monthly and Hispanic magazines.

Chuck Bonner, from Leoti, Kansas, contributed the use of his mural for illustrations used in the book. He combines the avocations of his parents—paleontology and art—in the Keystone Gallery and Fossil Museum, located in western Kansas on U.S. Highway 83 between Scott City and Oakley, Kansas. Bonner received his BA and MA in art from Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas.

• Foreword
• Imagine a World (see Explore Tab)
• Preface
• 1. What Is the Rock Chalk?
• 2. Collectors and Classification
• 3. Swimming Reptiles
• 4. Flying Reptiles
• 5. Invertebrates
• 6. Bony Fishes
• 7. Sharks
• 8. Birds
• 9. Hunting and Studying Fossils
• 10. Can You Identify These Fossils?
• 11. The Full Mural
• Kansas Museums and Chalkbed Sites
• Acknowledgements
• Further Reading
• About the Contributors

Imagine a World

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Lyrics

Imagine a world … an ancient sea
Where creatures swam is now prairie.
Reptiles in the air and birds with teeth,
Giant swimming lizards, sharks lurking beneath.

Prehistoric animals to blow your mind,
Swordfish and sailfish and all other kinds.
Flying pterodactyls and turtles abound.
The diversity of life can be found all around.

We're on the rolling prairie, now a sea of grass,
Once an open waterway in the distant past.
The earth is everchanging … we may need to swim again;
Now we're just trying to adapt to the world we're living in.

Delicate sea lilies and giant clams,
Huge filter-feeding fish eating what they can.
Ammonites and squids, swimming in the sea
The hunters become hunted, and then they have to flee.

This body of water, teeming with life,
So thick with living beings you can cut it with a knife.
They sink to the silty bottom, forever there entombed
Until they are discovered and hung up in a room.

We're on the rolling prairie, now a sea of grass,
Once an open waterway in the distant past.
The earth is everchanging … we may need to swim again;
Now we're just trying to adapt to the world we're living in.