This just in.

The Annals of Improbable Research reported last week that Kansas is flatter than a pancake.

The finding is causing a flap and has drawn a rebuttal from a Kansas University geologist whose own research suggests that Texas is, in fact, smaller than a breadbox.

In the Annals study, geographers from Southwest Texas State University and Arizona State University compared Kansas to “a well-cooked pancake from … the International House of Pancakes.”

Texas researcher Mark Fonstad and colleagues said the researchers began by converting the profile of the pancake, purchased from a local IHOP, to a digitized image.

If perfect flatness has a value of 1, the pancake’s flatness was about .957 — or “pretty flat,” in Fonstad’s words. But according to Fonstad, the Kansas flatness of .9997 indicates that the state is “damned flat.”

James McCauley, assistant scientist for the KU-based Kansas Geological Survey, who flipped when he heard the report, battered Fonstad’s findings.

If Kansas were turned into a pancake, he said, it would be a “very uneven one — about 3,300 feet thicker on the western end than on the eastern. All your syrup would end up in the Verdigris River near Coffeyville.”

Kansas reaches its heights at Mount Sunflower in the state’s northwest corner, where it’s 4,000 feet above sea level. McCauley did concede, however, that “Mount” Sunflower is more a gentle swell than a dramatic jut.

Coffeyville is in extreme southeast Kansas.

McCauley said that 21 states have less relief — less difference, that is, between their highest and lowest elevations — than does Kansas.

The nation’s flattest state is Florida, McCauley said, with a meager 345-foot difference between its low and high points.

Even the nation’s capital has more ups and downs than Florida, McCauley said.

The state inhabited by two of the three researchers involved in the Annals study — Texas — is not on much of a roll itself, McCauley said.

Parts of the Texas panhandle, for example, were called the Llano Estacado, or “staked plains,” by early settlers. That’s because the settlers drove stakes into the ground to keep track of their whereabouts in the flat, featureless terrain.

Meanwhile, McCauley added, “I have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Texas is actually smaller than a breadbox.”

He added, “Yes, I know, I’m talking about a really big breadbox — but then it takes a really big pancake to measure up to the state of Kansas.”

In his next study, McCauley said, he will compare the body scan of his Labrador retriever to that of a prominent politician of questionable ethics.

He said, “I want to demonstrate that the politician is crookeder than a dog’s hind leg.”

Fonstad said it was never his intention to suggest that flatness was a bad thing.

“I am originally from Wisconsin, and it, too, is elevationally challenged,” he said.

Flatness has advantages, McCauley said, and mountains are not an unrelieved good.

For example, you can’t see very far when you’re in the mountains, he said. There’s too much in the way.

Why has Kansas garnered a reputation for flatness, given evidence to the contrary?

McCauley said, “Maybe it’s because people always drive across the state at night.”