Smoky Hills Region

The chalk the plaque points to holds one of Kansas's best-known fossils. Xiphactinus was a large predatory fish of the Cretaceous seas, and the first of its fossils was found in Kansas in the Niobrara Chalk during the 1850s. George F. Sternberg collected a 14-foot specimen with a nearly perfect six-foot fish of the species Gillicus arcuatus inside it; the larger fish apparently died soon after swallowing it. That fish-within-a-fish is on display at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Hays. In 2010 a legislator proposed Xiphactinus as the state fossil, but Tylosaurus was chosen instead.

What the plaque says

Smoky Hills Region This region of Kansas contains the Smoky Hills, an area of rolling hills, occasional mesas, and buttes, with striking outcroppings. Pawnee Rock, Coronado Heights, and Rock City are notable Dakota sandstone formations in this region. The Smoky Hills Region features sand- stone caps in the east such as the rock "toadstools" in this park. More of these unique forms, sculpted by erosion, may be seen at Mushroom Rocks State Park near Carneiro, east of Ellsworth. In the mid-section of the region, hills are capped with limestone. Because of the scarcity of wood, early settlers made stone fence posts from this limestone. This custom is still in use. Chalk outcroppings can be seen in the western part of the region. Castle Rock and Monument Rocks are large chalk formations found in Gove County. Chalk bluffs are also located in Logan and Trego counties. These chalk formations, such as Wildcat Canyon in Trego County, are excellent sources of fossils from the Cretaceous Era. Erected by the State of Kansas

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• S. P. Dinsmoor's Garden of Eden — 26 mi
  A Civil War veteran's limestone log cabin in Lucas, ringed by forty-foot cement trees, Adam and Eve, and his Populist sermon on the people who crucify labor, with the builder himself in the mausoleum.
• Rock City — 26 mi
  About two hundred sandstone spheres, many as big as a room, crowded into a strip of pasture above the Solomon River south of Minneapolis, where groundwater cemented them inside buried sand.
• Coronado Heights — 28 mi
  A Dakota sandstone bluff 300 feet above the Smoky Valley north of Lindsborg, named by boosters for a Spanish visit that never happened here, with a WPA stone castle on top.
• Lindsborg Old Mill & Swedish Heritage Museum — 31 mi
  A roller mill of 1898 on the Smoky Hill that still turns over once a year, and a Swedish manor house shipped to the 1904 World's Fair and given to Lindsborg's college afterward.

More markers nearby

• Historic Kansas — 0.5 mi
• Ellsworth, the Cowtown and Fort — 11 mi
• Frontier in Lincoln County — 12 mi