Reviewed by Ephraim Nissan (London, England)
Everhart, M. 2017. Oceans of Kansas: A Natural History of the Western Interior Sea. 2nd ed. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN. ($34.99 e-book with 30% PS discount.)
Brought up to date, this second edition is concerned with whatever lived and was preserved as a fossil in “the vast inland sea that engulfed central North America during the age of the Dinosaurs,” from sharks (including giant ones) to marine reptiles, from pterosaurs to birds with teeth. It also traces the history of these discoveries, some as early as the 1860s. On purpose, some of the enclosed imagery shows obsolete reconstructions (the caption explains what is obsolete about these), e.g. of a fossil bird, and this in order to convey how ideas have changed over time.
There are two prefaces: one for both editions, separated by a dozen years. The first begins with a description of driving through Kansas—“the most visible change from east to west is going from a moderate number of trees to almost no trees” (xiii)—and continues with recollections of the author’s early interests in fossils (“for about as long as I can remember”). “Kansas has a wide variety of fossils, from very old Mississippian rocks (more than 340 million years old) in the extreme southeastern corner of the state” (xiii), to whatever was “deposited as bottom muds in the series of Paleozoic and Mesozoic oceans that covered Kansas” (xiii), whereas Tertiary sediments in Kansas are nonmarine.
Chapter 1 (“Introduction: An Ocean in Kansas?”) begins with a fiction: “One Day in the Life of a Mosasaur” (is that an intertextual reference to the title of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's classic novel?): “His jaws were more than four feet long and were lined with sharp, conical teeth that he used to seize and kill his prey” (1). “If he let go of his prey in the middle of the ocean, there was a good chance a hungry shark would grab it or it would sink to the bottom and be lost” (1).
The fictional description is engaging: a good way to start this book, and one matching both the picture (mosasaurs swimming, seen from below) on the front of the dust cover, and the drawing on the frontispiece (that one is a reconstruction of the mosasaur Tylosaurus, and also appears on p. 235, smaller but not splayed at the joint of two facing pages, which is the case of the illustration of the frontispiece). In contrast, the front cover of the first edition showed a giant shark jumping out of the water and biting a smaller mosasaur, while above, several Pteranodon are seen flying.
Before we reach the unnumbered “Epilogue: Where Did It Go?” (366), we’ll have gone through Ch. 2 (“Our Discovery of the Western Interior Sea”), Ch. 3 (“Invertebrates, Plants, and Trace Fossils”), Ch. 4 about sharks, Ch. 5 about other fishes of all sizes, Ch. 6 on giant leatherback turtles, Ch. 7 on the elasmosaurs, Ch. 8 (“Pliosaurs and Polycotylids”), Ch. 9 on the mosasaurs, Ch. 10 on the flying pterosaurs; Ch. 11 on toothed birds; and Ch. 12, “Dinosaurs?”—a nodosaur discovered in 1930 is a mystery: how was it carried not just to sea, but “hundreds of miles from the nearest shore to the middle of the Western Interior Sea? ” (328). Nor is that set of dinosaur remains unique where the Western Interior Sea had been.
This leads to Ch. 13 (“The Big Picture”), which mostly proceeds chronologically. “The Western Interior Sea during the Late Cretaceous extended across the middle of North America from the present-day Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. Its width varied considerably through time” (341). Everhart estimates that the sea’s maximal extension (at the end of the Turonian) was about 5,000 km long, and about 1,600 km wide from east to west (342).
The fictional preamble to Ch. 1 is a regular feature throughout this book, and it is a lovable boon throughout. It puts you in the right mood, to get on with a more conventional format of plunging into technicalities. But the nicest thing is that the text remains consistently approachable, while rigorous. Quite a feat.