Old Man of the Fossil Beds recounts the life of the author's father, Marion Charles Bonner, a field paleontologist who contributed major fossils from the Niobrara chalk beds of western Kansas to museums all over North America. The marine animals he collected include plesiosaurs, sharks, mosasaurs, fishes of all sizes, Pteranodons, and prehistoric birds and invertebrates. The book describes these fossils, how they were collected, and the museums they went to. Bonner's closest friends from museums were George Fryer Sternberg of the Fort Hays (Kansas) Museum and Shelton P. Applegate of the Los Angeles County Museum, and those two institutions hold scores of Bonner's fossils. Bonner collected several new species, but the high point of his life's work was a new marine genus, described posthumously: Bonnerichthys, a large filter-feeding fish described in 2010 that filled a vacant niche in the Niobrara Cretaceous ecosystem.
His story starts in Chase County Nebraska in 1911 and ends in Lane County Kansas in 1992, but his legacy in fossils and family continues. Woven throughout Bonner's story is the growth of his family with his wife, Margaret, in the small Kansas town of Leoti. Along the way, he experienced pioneer living, early farming, tornadoes, the Roaring Twenties, the Dust Bowl, World War II, the prosperous 1950s, fossil-rich 1960s, and destitute 1970s. The Bonner family were wheat farmers and movie theater owners. Running movies at night and hunting fossils in the morning was a pattern all eight Bonner children experienced. The children also found unique and important specimens that contributed to the museum-worthy Bonner fossil specimens. Two of his sons became paleontologists as well.
