HAYS, Kansas — Hours digging in the August sun rewarded Kris Super, a Wichita freshman at Fort Hays State University, with a remarkable discovery — more than half a skeleton of an 85 million-year old bird.
Super and a few of his paleontology friends spent their last weekend before school “in the chalk” looking for fossils near Castle Rock, in Gove County, west of Hays. Late one afternoon, Super noticed some small bones wedged in rock.
“I was able to free a medium-sized slab of rock containing the bones,” said Super.
At first, Super said, the fossils looked like a “scrappy fish.” But after further study in his dorm room later that night, he thought it might be a bird instead. “I noticed a raised edge along the side of one of the bones that told me it used to be hollow,” said Super.
That same night, he emailed Dr. Laura Wilson, curator of paleontology at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History and an assistant professor of geosciences at FHSU. They met the next morning, on Super’s first day of college.
It turns out he found the remains of a toothed flying bird called Ichthyornis from the Mesozoic Era– about 252 million to 66 million years ago. Ichthyornis is Greek for “fish-bird” and is named that way due to its fish-like vertebrae.
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