by Aaron Strain
Guest Column
Every rock tells a story.
In Kansas, most of those stories are about water—seas and oceans rising and falling over hundreds of millions of years.
The fossil-rich Flint Hills limestones tell us a marine environment once thrived here and eventually disappeared. The Permian climate was hot and arid, but oxygen-rich, allowing insects to grow bigger than they ever would be again. Some of the largest insect fossils were found near the small town of Elmo, Kansas.
The state was a large, dry basin about 270 million years ago. As global sea levels rose and fell in rapid cycles, highly salinated water rushed in and evaporated, leaving behind vast deposits of salt and gypsum.
Skipping ahead 150 million years or so, oceans rose again, splitting our continent in half and depositing the red and orange Smoky Hills sandstones. As the ocean grew deeper, giant fish and mosasaurs dominated life in the Cretaceous interior seaway. Their preserved skeletons litter the western part of our state, the site of countless influential paleontological discoveries.
We know all this because of the rocks and the people who can read them.
The luckiest among us share in the privilege of taking expert-guided field trips with youth groups or friends to the most desolate of places across our beautiful state in search of rock outcrops and roadcuts that expose vast amounts of geologic time. But we cannot all be so lucky.
This is where museums thrive: at the border between the latest scientific pursuits and public accessibility.
They are the interpreters of history. They inspire visitors to learn and experience amazing chapters of a story larger than the human species.
Community-wide feelings of devastation occur when budget cuts threaten a cherished museum. This is why many have felt heartbreak following news out of Hays that the Sternberg Museum of Natural History may close at the end of the year.
The Sternberg started as a small exhibit space on the Fort Hays State University campus and grew into a shining educational institution of the high plains. The museum studies and displays countless fossils from across geologic time. Some of their collection is world-famous, including the “Fish-Within-a-Fish” fossil.
In their haste to cut spending, the federal government and Kansas Legislature have dramatically reduced funding for higher education and museums. This correlates with colleges downsizing and combining departments, raising tuition prices, cutting programs and firing faculty, and the closure of Philadelphia’s world-class Academy of Natural Science.
At the same time, politicians have attacked universities for supposedly harboring dangerous ideas and committing fraud and abuse. These attacks will have long-term negative consequences.
Hopefully, budget cuts and short-term thinking will not result in the dinosaur dome upon I-70 going extinct.
For our part, the FHSU Foundation has to raise $855,000 to keep the museum open to the public.
When we “read the rocks” through our study of geology, it is only natural to ask ourselves where we fit in our planet’s story and what legacy we will leave behind.
To ask these questions is to be human.
To answer them depends on the decisions we make every day to support valued institutions of interpretation and inspiration.
Let us write a better story than one ending in scattered bones across western Kansas chalk beds.
Aaron Strain is a docent for the Strataca, Kansas Underground Salt Museum, in Hutchinson and also a freelance reporter for the Hutchinson Tribune.