Overview

Old Man of the Fossil Beds recounts the life of the author's father, Marion Charles Bonner, a field paleontologist who contributed major fossils from the Niobrara chalk beds of western Kansas to museums all over North America. The marine animals he collected include plesiosaurs, sharks, mosasaurs, fishes of all sizes, Pteranodons, and prehistoric birds and invertebrates. The book describes these fossils, how they were collected, and the museums they went to. Bonner's closest friends from museums were George Fryer Sternberg of the Fort Hays (Kansas) Museum and Shelton P. Applegate of the Los Angeles County Museum, and those two institutions hold scores of Bonner's fossils. Bonner collected several new species, but the high point of his life's work was a new marine genus, described posthumously: Bonnerichthys, a large filter-feeding fish described in 2010 that filled a vacant niche in the Niobrara Cretaceous ecosystem. His story starts in Chase County Nebraska in 1911 and ends in Lane County Kansas in 1992, but his legacy in fossils and family continues. Woven throughout Bonner's story is the growth of his family with his wife, Margaret, in the small Kansas town of Leoti. Along the way, he experienced pioneer living, early farming, tornadoes, the Roaring Twenties, the Dust Bowl, World War II, the prosperous 1950s, fossil-rich 1960s, and destitute 1970s. The Bonner family were wheat farmers and movie theater owners. Running movies at night and hunting fossils in the morning was a pattern all eight Bonner children experienced. The children also found unique and important specimens that contributed to the museum-worthy Bonner fossil specimens. Two of his sons became paleontologists as well.

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Reviews

Melanie Bonner Thomas invites readers into her loving and exotic family circle as she describes her father's career as a prehistoric bone collector in Western Kansas. Memoir, history, travelogue, and paleontology blend together seamlessly in this love song to the High Plains, yes, reminiscent of Mari Sandoz as well as William Stafford, Willa Cather, and other great writers of the region. --Denise Low, former Kansas Poet Laureate, author of House of Grace, House of Blood Old Man of the Fossil Beds is part memoir, part history of paleontology. Melanie Bonner Thomas takes you inside the first family of fossil collecting on the twentieth-century High Plains of Kansas. Check it out before your next trip to the chalk beds or local museum. You'll come away with a new appreciation for one man's obsession with big Cretaceous fossils, from mosasaurs to pterosaurs, and what it took to collect them. --Rex Buchanan, Director Emeritus of the Kansas Geological Survey, editor of Kansas Geology

Author Information

Melanie Bonner Thomas, a western Kansas native, is the youngest child of paleontologist Marion Bonner. She spent most of her career as an editor and writer in Austin, Texas, and currently lives in New Orleans. She has written articles on paleontology, archaeology, and history for Texas Monthly and Hispanic magazines.

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