Kansas Journal

He is one of the late Bonner's eight children and an artist and fossil collector, co-owning, with his wife Barbara, Keystone Gallery two miles north of Scott County in Logan County on U.S. 83.

"Guess we know it now," Chuck Bonner said.

It was back in the summer of 1971 when the fish was found while the family was on one of their routine fossil hunts, at a spot in Logan County the Bonner children had dubbed the "Big Place."

While Chuck discovered the fossil bone sticking out of a chalk spire, it was Marion Bonner who went on to collect the specimen "in situ," meaning he collected the fossil the way it was found. The fish was on a perch that made lifting it out of the hard chalky earth precarious. So Marion carved out a place to stand. While Chuck worked on it the first day, he had to return to college.

It took months to collect, with Marion returning to the site through the fall and into 1972, finally lifting it out in a plaster cast.

For years the fish was at the University of Kansas Natural History Museum where another of Bonner's children, Orville worked at the museum.

Scientists were puzzled as to its identity. Years passed and Chuck explained that the fossil eventually was sent to Colorado to be cast in plastic. It was there a researcher named Matt Friedman, working on his Ph.D., began studying the fish and identified it as a new genus.

That's the condensed version of the story. But a special part of the story is what a hoot Marion Bonner would have knowing he was back in the news, 18 years after his death.

A gregarious man, he would introduce himself to strangers saying, "I'm not making any new acquaintances or renewing any old."

But, he always was up for meeting new people. If they expressed an interest, that was even better, because then he would invite them to go to the fossil fields with him.

On one of the hunts I tagged along and traveled in his 1968 Oldsmobile. It was the spring of 1981 and he was 72 at the time, recalling his first hunt on the way.

That was in the 1920's and he drove a Model T Ford. He described a different place back then with few fences and the fossils pretty much untouched, with fish lying everywhere. Then in the 1930's the dirt blew and covered them.

He continued to hunt throughout his lifetime, running a movie theatre for years in Leoti.

When I met him later in his life, his beloved wife had died, and his eight children had flown the nest. The long family dinning room table was covered with newspapers because that's where huge plaster casts of fish would be worked up before sending them off to museums.

Hunting fossils with Marion was a science and history lesson rolled into one. He would break into song or recite "The Shooting of Dan Magrew," at any moment.

He once told me the excitement came in knowing that just underneath an overburden might be something new to science.

Even now, all these years' later Bonners words still ring true.

Hanks spent more than 20 years on a farm near Dighton. She is a graduate of the Kansas Agriculture and Rural Leaders program and is a reporter at the Hutchinson News.