Monument Rocks ? Living where he can see 25 miles of open prairie and sometimes roaming buffalo, Chuck Bonner is right where he wants to be, right in the middle of a remote treasure trove of fossils.

Not just any fossils, but creatures with tongue-twisting names like xiphactinus and pteranodon that were around about 80 million years ago when western Kansas was at the bottom of an ocean.

“You can’t avoid walking on fossils. You’re right in the heart of them,” Bonner said.

The nearest landmark from his Logan County house is Monument Rocks, towering formations of chalk rock that are the remains of the sediment from the inland sea. Scott City is 18 miles south; Oakley 25 miles north and there’s not much in between.

Bonner and his wife, Barbara Shelton, live in a house they restored in the 1980s with solar heat and wind-powered generators. Nearby in a limestone church built in 1916 is their Keystone Gallery, featuring her photography, his paintings and many fossils big and small. Weather permitting, Bonner conducts paid fossil hunting tours of the area.

Lifetime of fossil hunting

Don’t confuse Bonner with some amateur scavenger. He has a good reputation among paleontologists, including Greg Liggett, assistant director at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Hays.

“He grew up learning about them and collecting and has continued to learn. Having a knowledgeable person in the field is really valuable to the science,” Liggett said. “He has a good eye for collecting and he knows the rocks.”

Bonner learned about fossils from his father, Marion Bonner, who spent decades combing the chalk outcroppings of the area. His father, who died at age 81 in 1992, also was close friend of the museum’s namesake, George Sternberg, and the two men hunted fossils together.

Chuck Bonner carries plaster and water used to recover a fossilized fish across a chalk bed near Monument Rocks. Bonner, who has collected fossils from the western Kansas chalk beds since he was a child, recovered the fossils last month.

At age 53, Bonner has found more than 1,000 noteworthy fossils.

He’s particularly proud of a four-foot skull of a pteranodon, a flying reptile, on display at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. He also has donated fossils to museums in New York, Chicago and Denver.

Noteworthy discoveries

Liggett credits Bonner with rediscovering an area with fossils of a rare sea animal known as the unita crinus.

“It was collected around the turn of the 1900s and after those initial collections, no more of those specimens could be found,” Liggett said. “Chuck found a locality with these specimens and brought it to the attention of the scientists.”

For Bonner, a good day is roaming the rocks, never knowing what he might find. He stays away from the Monument Rocks because they have been picked over.

“The secret is to be at the right place at the right time. You see something sticking out and start looking for the rest of it,” he said. “The most predictable thing about this place is the unpredictability.”

Armed with a small pickax, scraper and paint bush, the lean and bearded Bonner scours the rocky terrain as he walks slowly, bent over with his eyes to the ground to get a closer look.

“Some days you can walk a lot of miles and not find anything … wait! There’s a bone,” he said.

What looked like another rock was a fish fossil Bonner said was 75 millions years old, give or take a few million. He said a nearby round rock was really the fossil of a giant clam.

Time of the Chalk

Bonner looks over a mural he painted on the wall of his museum and gallery near Monument Rocks. The scene depicts what western Kansas may have looked 80 million years ago and includes many of the creatures from which Bonner has spent his lifetime collecting fossils.

The ocean that covered the area slowly receded and 60 million years ago it was gone, leaving behind what became the fossil-filled chalk rock that’s found in Ellis, Trego, Gove, Logan and Wallace counties.

That era is known as the Cretaceous Period, or Time of the Chalk. To put things in perspective, scientists say the earth is about 4.6 billion years old and the first humanoid fossils date back about 6 million years.

Dinosaurs were around during this period, but they weren’t in western Kansas because it was all ocean. Bonner said a few dinosaur fossils have been found in the area because they died on land and somehow ended up in the water and floated with the current.

Bonner’s other love is painting, a talent he inherited from his mother. He does everything from abstracts to realistic images such as a cowboy playing a fiddle in front of a fireplace.

At one end of the museum, a 6-by-24 foot mural Bonner painted covers a wall, depicting what the watery area and the animals may have looked like.

Among items on display in the museum is the 14-foot fossil of a fish known as the xiphactinus audax, which Bonner said was the largest bony fish that ever lived.

He said the specimen was collected in the 1980s using the plaster slab method. The bones are cleaned in the field, a frame constructed and plaster poured onto the bones. When the plaster dried, the slab was dug up and the fossil was turned over and cleaned.

Bonner said he has a habit of naming his fossils, such as the mosasaur, a giant reptile resembling a lizard with paddles. He calls it Old Yeller because it was found in yellow chalk rock.

He said he’s keeping more of his finds to build up his own museum. That’s because many museums don’t have to the money to pay Bonner, but there’s also another reason.

“When you name them, it’s hard to get rid of them,” he said with a smile.