Traces of Copper Metal Arts in Marion Kansas

Travel with Bennett-Watt and discover the Traces of Copper metal arts workshop in Marion Kansas.

Speaker: In the badlands of Kansas, just north of Scott City, Monument Rock poked up 70 feet or so above the rolling prairies, youth testament to life during the Cretaceous period over a million years ago. This area along the Smoky River is world famous for its extraordinary fossil deposits, many of which are quite large. In an old scum building that once was church, is now Keystone Art Gallery and Fossil Museum. Here, expert fossil detectives, Barbara Shelton and Chuck Bonner are living their American dream. Chuck Bronner: Well, the fossils from Kansas, western Kansas specifically, are world renowned. They were first found in the 1860’s and what basically happened was is there was a rivalry going on between paleontologists and they came out here and just really fell off a lot of things. Some of the most famous fossils from Kansas are mosasaurs which are big swimming reptiles, some reaching like 45 feet. Other things were flying reptiles like pterodactyls, the ones with the crisps, they're from Kansas, so most of the best ones are all found in Kansas. So, you can't trench as many fish in Kansas as you could have back then. And then there's 14-foot fish, sometimes bigger. And all of these things have huge fangs, so that’s why everything ate everything else, even little fish had big fangs, so—you know it's a basically 500-feetdeep inland sea. So semitropical, probably 500-foot deep too, so anything that would live in the ocean, an environment like that are present. Barbara Shelton: So what we’re trying to do is get example of—we kind of fossil that is in the Harbor truck formation into the gallery. Some of them were so rare that you have hard 7 you're doing, fine. We have some of these excellent examples, Mosasaurs, Xiphactinus, Pteranodons, and various fishes, and a few bird fossils also. And it's also to educate people what is out here and give them a history of this area. Chuck Bronner: This is a Xiphactinus fish too. This is the same type of fish you hand it up to the wall. This is probably 12-foot fish, or maybe a little longer. But what's nice about this one is we’re able to open the mouth and the skull, so you can see both sides. And if you see how narrow it is here, the reason why that is narrow like that, it is laid flat one time, so the pressure of all the kinds of sediments squeezed at flat. Now, what was nice about this, this is the way I found, so the mouth, so we’re able to do an open mouth thing, it shows both sides of it. But Barb found this in—she founded by the vertebrate, as you can here, so all the body was washed away. So we knew it was just the skull. Pretty impressive skull anyway, because you can get up close and personal with this one.