One Hundred Years Ago in the Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science: A Second Dinosaur Discovered in Kansas

At the forty-first annual meeting of the Kansas Academy of Science (December 31, 1908 January 2, 1909) in Topeka, Charles H. Sternberg (1909) reported the discovery of what was then the remains of only the second dinosaur from the Smoky Hill Chalk of western Kansas. Sternberg (1909, p. 257) came across the weathered bones during the summer of 1905 and had originally identified the remains as those of a "large, new sea-tortoise with an ossified carapace." He later shipped them, along with other turtle specimens, to Dr. G.R. Wieland for description. In 1908, Sternberg visited the Yale Peabody Museum and was asked by Wieland why he thought the specimen was a new turtle. Wieland then told Sternberg that "it was new enough, but these plates were the dermal scutes of an armored dinosaur" (Sternberg 1909, p. 257).