What does the term “buried treasure” bring to your mind?
Perhaps Caribbean beaches and palm trees, pirate ships
sporting the Jolly Roger and wooden chests of gold bullion?
Or maybe gems mined from beneath the ground? Both of these
images have something in common with the fossil treasures
that have been found buried beneath the Kansas prairie.
Today Kansas hardly resembles a Caribbean island, but
in the Permian period (245 to 280 million years ago) of
the late Paleozoic Kansas was tropical. North America
and Europe were close to the equator. The oceans were
receding, and much of Kansas was a coastal plain at the
edge of an inland sea. And while paleontologists may not
dig diamonds or gold from beneath the ground, they do
unearth gems of knowledge: the fossilized remains of ancient
life forms.
Put the two images together to get the treasure that
I have in mind: a rich and well-preserved trove of insect
fossils that were buried during the tropical Permian period
and can now be dug from beneath the Kansas prairie. Paleontologists
call such sites “Lagerstatten.” Literally translated from
the German as “deposits,” this word has come to mean a
“fossil bonanza,” a place where fossils are particularly
numerous and valuable.
Few Kansans are aware that their
state contains one of the most celebrated sites for Paleozoic
insect fossils: the Elmo, Kansas Lagerstatten in southern
Dickinson County. I hope this issue of the Kansas School
Naturalist will help to change that situation. The variety,
quantity, and quality of insect fossils found in the Kansas
Permian limestone are known to paleontologists around
the world. In this issue we will briefly review what the
Elmo fossils tell us about the insects that flew over
Kansas long ago. We will also learn a bit about the interesting
people who discovered, studied, and wrote about the insects
of the Kansas Permian. There is still much to be learned
about Paleozoic insects; perhaps a reader of this pamphlet
will be inspired to carry on the study of the Permian
fossil insects of Elmo, Kansas.
Figure 1. The treasure site. The Elmo, Kansas Permian
Insect site as it appears today. After the last visit
by Frank Carpenter of Harvard in the 1930’s, the end of
the dig had been marked with a steel rod and the gully
refilled. The fill has now been removed and the quarry
extended. The pick rests on the insect layer and the shovel
blade points to a dark area which is a blackish shale
containing fossilized stumps and branches from an ancient
swamp that underlies the insect layer of limestone. The
site is currently being worked under lease by the team
of Jason and Matthew Dinges and Jerry Green of Hays, Kansas.
The photo was taken by Roy Beckemeyer on a visit to the
site with Jason in September of 1999.
