photo by: AdobeStock

Monument Rocks, part of the Niobrara Chalk Beds in western Kansas, are pictured.

For over 40 years, childhood memories of fossil-hunting in western Kansas’ Niobrara Chalk Beds have lingered with Melanie Bonner Thomas.

Now, Thomas has fashioned those memories of her family’s passion for paleontology into “Old Man of the Fossil Beds.” The story is both a memoir and a dive into prehistoric life, woven into the history of the Kansas High Plains. Poring over crates of family files and letters, along with more than 200 images, Thomas uncovered her past. The project made her realize how much Western Kansas and her father, Marion Bonner, shaped the person she has become.

The University of Kansas graduate and frequent writer for Texas Monthly will be a featured speaker later this month at the Kansas Book Festival in Topeka, and will follow that appearance with a presentation at the Lawrence Public Library early next month.

Thomas has made a career of writing about obscure topics, often related to history and science. After retiring, though, Thomas knew it was time to face the daunting task of telling the story that had been brewing for decades.

Throughout her adult life, whenever she casually mentioned growing up in western Kansas in a fossil-hunting family, people were captivated, especially when she shared that her father’s discoveries were in museums from Los Angeles to New York, with some fossils named for the family.

She set out to tell that scientific story that seemed to naturally capture people’s attention.

“It was never going to be anything but about Dad, documenting his activities in the scientific world and his contributions,” Thomas said of the original idea for the book.

But it grew into more. She decided to write a memoir and asked her siblings for input. Thomas is one of eight children; four were born before World War II and four after, between 1936 and 1957. Thomas, the youngest, said she felt an urgency to finish the book as her siblings were growing older.

“They all had a different relationship with Dad — and they knew this was my memory; they just let me do my thing,” Thomas said.

The plan was to focus on Marion’s scientific contributions and how his passion for digging up fossils was passed on to his children. But she realized the Bonner paleontological story began with Marion and her mother, Margaret. Their love story unfolded during the hard times of the Dust Bowl. On one of their early dates, Marion took Margaret to the fossil beds, the special place where he discovered his first fossil in 1925 while hunting with his high school teacher.

What was once the Niobrara Cretaceous inland sea became Bonner’s hunting grounds. One mentor was George F. Sternberg, known for discovering a fish-within-a-fish in Gove County and for the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Hays. Over the years, Bonner supported his family through farming in Wichita County and owning Leoti’s Plaza Theater. He spent every free moment in the fossil beds, often with his children. In 1955, Bonner discovered a nearly complete plesiosaur, still on display at the Sternberg Museum.

Margaret Bonner died suddenly in 1967, just before Thomas’s 10th birthday. Fossil hunting became a way the family coped with their grief.

“It became our therapy,” Thomas said in an interview from her home in Bayou Vista, Texas. That first summer, despite reeling from Margaret’s death, they made several significant finds.

Bonner made a huge discovery- a complete skeleton of the mosasaur Platecarpus. Thomas also came upon a rare find – a spear squid that scientists eventually named Enchoteuthis melanae, after her.

“Dad was a very nurturing father,” Thomas said. “He was hell-bent on getting me out of high school, to finish the job of raising us. Looking back as an adult, I think he had a very unusual dedication; he cooked all the time, and then fossil hunted.”

photo by: Submitted

Melanie Bonner Thomas

What Thomas has produced is not just a story of her unconventional father and their relationship but her seven older siblings’ collective memories of fossil hunting. Her oldest brother, Orville, spent his entire career as a fossil proprietor at the University of Kansas Natural History Museum. Another brother, Chuck, made his own rare discoveries. Some are on display, along with his artwork, in the Keystone Gallery, north of Scott City.

Along with the book’s scientific aspects, Thomas’ writing evokes images of the plains that remind former Kansas Poet Laureate Denise Low of classic writers such as Mari Sandoz, Willa Cather and William Stafford.

“Today’s publishing world is chaotic, with established presses and distributors no longer in business and online venues taking up more of readers’ attention. For Kansas and the grasslands region, the writings of Sandoz, Stafford, and Cather continue to be baseline, because they combine admiration of the landscape with personal stories. This book does both,” Low said.

While in graduate school, Thomas shared an office with Low in the basement of Wescoe Hall from 1979 through 1981. They worked together on the Cottonwood Review magazine.

“She told me about her home in Leoti and her father’s paleontology research and discoveries. It was part of who she was,” said Low. ” She continues, in ‘Old Man of the Fossil Beds,’ to combine her personal experience with exact details and science, and she does so seamlessly.”

Thomas and Low will meet up once again at the Kansas Book Festival in Topeka, Sept. 26, in the Washburn Library. Thomas and Dennis Garcia, author of Las Madres: Latinas in the Heartland Who Led Their Family to Success, will have a panel discussion about Family Research and Remembrance, moderated by Low.

Low believes the book will appeal to paleontology professionals and amateurs alike.

“Especially people who love the mysteries of the Great Plains – who live there? What inland seas still imprint the landscape?”

Published in December 2025 by Chalk Lily Press, “Old Man” has been named a 2026 finalist in the National Indie Excellence Award in the nature category.

After finishing “Old Man,” Thomas turned much of her paleontological research into “Fossils of the Rock Chalk.” It’s a beginner’s guide for fossil hunters, illustrated by Chuck Bonner. Both books are for sale in the gift shop at KU’s Natural History Museum and The Raven Bookstore, 809 Massachusetts Street.

Thomas’ presentation at the Lawrence Public Library is set for 2 p.m. on Oct. 2.