
My son was stationed at Fort Riley, and took my husband and I fossil hunting in the Niobrara Chalk of Kansas in October of 2003.
The chalk formed from an inland sea that divided North America during the age of dinosaurs.

This is my husband. We found jaws, teeth and bones either sticking out of the chalk and laying about.
Keith had told me that if I found anything good that was embedded in the chalk, to leave my fossil bag by it, and come and get him. Otherwise I’d never find the fossils again. (Besides, I had no idea how to safely remove fossils from the chalk.)

Luckily, he told me that, otherwise I definitely wouldn’t have found these 31 vertebrae again. The chalk had eroded down enough to completely separate them from it.
(The biggest one measures an inch in diameter.)

What makes them so rare is that they’re shark vertebrae.

Shark vertebrae are made of cartilage, not bone, and are rarely preserved.
————

When I went to find Keith, I found him 15 feet high on a small ledge cutting out a protosphyraena fin (swordfish). Obviously, I had to wait until he was done.

Later after cleaning the fossil and reshaping the chalk, he gave it to me on Christmas. The fin measures 11 1/2 inches long. It’s now displayed on a bookcase in my living room.
———–
Anyone wanting more information on the chalk and fossils of Kansas might visit:
http://oceansofkansas.com/
and
for protosphyraena:
http://www.oceansofkansas.com/protosphyr.html