Thoughts from Kansas

The world is full of beautiful and strange things. Indonesian insects with eyes on stalks, African mole rats, Amazonian parrots and Chinese snakehead fish.

We can get so caught up in the exotic world of other places that we forget the strange and fascinating right under our own noses.

As fortune has it Gary Bichelmeyer and three friends had their eyes open as they kayaked the Wakarusa River last weekend.

Edit: Not the Kaw, I'm stupid

The Lawrence Journal-World tells how

the Aug. 16 trip turned uncommon in that, by day’s end, their kayaks were loaded with the upper jawbone and four intact molars of an American mastodon, as well as pieces of the skull.

From the river they telephoned Larry Martin, professor of paleontology at Kansas University and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the KU Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center.

Tuesday morning, the brothers showed the fossilized bones to Martin and his staff.

“It’s the best I’ve seen in Kansas,” said Martin, who has been on the KU faculty since 1972.

This one's skull probably floated away from the body, then sank. The drought I mentioned earlier means lower river levels, and four friends on a river spotted something odd. They came home with a piece of our shared history in the back of their kayak. They all have stories to tell their friends, and these bones will tell scientists stories all of their own.

Pollen trapped in the skull may tell researchers what plants grew when the mastodon died, and what it may have eaten. The ratios of carbon atoms in the bone will tell us when it died. Finding the rest of the body will tell us how it lived.

A mouth that's been full of mud for 10,000 years will start telling stories. And all because a few people had their eyes open to the wonders of the world around us.