Michael J. Everhart

Michael J. Everhart is a 1969 graduate of Wichita State University. After his military service (U.S. Army) he returned to Wichita State for his Masters Degree (1973). Mike has been an Adjunct Curator of Paleontology at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History, Fort Hays State University, Hays, Kansas since 1998. Mike is an expert on Late Cretaceous marine fossils of central and western Kansas, and on the history of paleontology in Kansas. In addition, he has worked with the "T rex Sue" exhibition at the Sternberg Museum in Hays, and Exploration Place in Wichita. Mike was a contributor to the BBC documentary "Chased by Sea Monsters" and served as one of the senior science advisers on the 2007 National Geographic IMAX film, Sea Monsters. His work has been featured in five made for television videos on the History and Discovery channels. Mike is the author of “Sea Monsters: Prehistoric Creatures of the Deep” (National Geographic, 2007) and “Oceans of Kansas – A Natural History of the Western Interior Sea” (Indiana University Press, 2005). The Sea Monsters book was awarded in 2008 by the American Library Association, and both titles were honored as Kansas Notable books. In addition, Mike has also written many papers describing the fossils of the Smoky Hill Chalk, including the 2005 naming of a new species of a marine reptile (mosasaur) from Kansas called Tylosaurus kansasensis. Most recently, Mike and co-author Alyssa Bell described two examples of the oldest bird fossils in North America, based on specimens that originated from Russell County, Kansas. A new pliosaur (Megacephalosaurus), another mosasaur (Selmasaurus) and a giant filter-feeding fish (Bonnerichthys) have been added to the fauna of the Western Interior Sea. Mike is the creator and webmaster of the educational “Oceans of Kansas Paleontology” web site: www.oceansofkansas.com which has been on the Internet since December, 1996. He served as an editor of the Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science since 2006 and was President of the KAS in 2005 and 2015. He and his wife have been the Managing Editors of the Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science since 2014. In 2017, he published the 2nd Edition of Oceans of Kansas, updating the first edition with new discoveries, Kansas paleo-history and over 200 color photos.