Smith Center ? Three hundred million years ago, Kansas was covered in water that was teeming with life, including sharks.

Thirteen thousand years ago, mammoths roamed the state.

Seventy-six-year-old Smith Center resident Bob Levin, an amateur paleontologist, has a collection of about 6,000 artifacts to back up those and other facts about prehistoric Kansas.

Levin said he was 6 or 7 years old when he found deer antlers sticking out of a creek bed. That was enough to get Levin interested in digging, preserving, studying and collecting animal fossils.

“I’ve been digging and scratching ever since,” he said.

Levin retired as the owner of an ambulance service in 2000, which allowed him to step up his search for ancient animal bones and teeth.

The Salina Journal reports that his latest find, a femur ball (hip) of a mammoth, was discovered just this past month. It was part of a mammoth he first discovered in 1998. Now, 18 years later, he unearthed another bone from the now-extinct beast.

“The femur ball is larger than a softball, so he was a big dude,” he said of the mammoth.

“It was eroding out of a wash across the road where I found the other bones,” Levin said. “It was down inside of a gully. There was just a little bit of bone sticking out. I didn’t know what it was the first day. It took some digging. After moving a couple of ounces of dirt I could see it was going to be the femur head.”

The femur was found 65 feet south of the main collection of mammoth bones.

“It was scattered before it was buried. Something scattered it, probably water,” he said.

Also this past year, Levin found the remains of a Tylosaurus proriger, a reptile-like animal.

“It looked like an alligator except it didn’t have feet; it had paddles,” he said. “We had the skull, and that’s 4 feet long, so they know (the entire animal) would be 28 to 30 feet long.”

Levin’s collection, which after he dies will go to Salina’s Rolling Hills Zoo, is scattered throughout his office and a garage.

“Everything is labeled. Everything is numbered,” he said. “I’ve had people from as far away as Kenya and Belgium visit.”

Levin said he learned paleontology by reading books, of which he has about 800.

One of Levin’s prize finds is the tooth from a shark, a Hybodus that he uncovered south of Gaylord, a small town in Smith County.

“It’s very rare. I thought I was going to get to name it, but some man in England named it in 1850,” he said. “He (Louis Agassiz, a Swiss-born biologist and geologist) found one, too, so he got to name it.”

He said professional paleontologists at the Field Museum of Natural History, in Chicago, verified the tooth and said that only one other like it had been found in the United States, and that was in Texas. The tooth came from a shark that lived during the Cretaceous Period, 65 to 144 million years ago.

Another unique collection of fossils in his possession came from a Gomphothere, a four-tusked elephant. The bones were found 8 miles west and 13 north of Smith Center.

“I have a five-and-a-half foot tusk and a lower tusk that’s 24 inches long,” Levin said.

Though an amateur, Levin has worked in Wyoming with world-renowned paleontologist Bob Bakker. Bakker, famous for his white beard and straw hat, was a consultant for the classic dinosaur movie “Jurassic Park.”

Levin also helped dig with the University of Nebraska as a field assistant at the Ashfall Fossil Beds Historical Park in northeastern Nebraska.

“He has a huge collection,” said Ashfall park Superintendent Rick Otto. “There are some avid collectors around. You get over into the western part of Kansas, that’s good fossil-hunting country.”

Levin said there are six sites in Smith County where whole bones or bone fragments of mammoths have been found.

“They were pretty thick up here actually, if you know where to look,” he said. And knowing where to look is the secret.

Levin’s love of fossil-hunting has brought him a measure of notoriety. He appeared in the IMAX movie, “Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric Adventure,” produced by National Geographic.

He played the part of Myrl Walker, who was with George Sternberg in 1952 in Gove County, when they discovered the famous fish-within-a-fish fossil that now is displayed at the Sternberg Musem, in Hays.

The larger of the two fish was a Xiphactinus audax — a predatory fish that lived during the Late Cretaceous.