Marion Charles Bonner
Marion Charles Bonner was an American field paleontologist who discovered and collected hundreds of fossils, primarily from the Niobrara Cretaceous Smoky Hill chalk outcroppings in Logan, Scott, and Gove counties of western Kansas. Largely self-taught, he frequently collaborated with museum paleontologists, including George F. Sternberg, at Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas, and Shelton P. Applegate, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.
Notable fossils collected by Bonner
Bonner’s fossil collecting career spanned 60 years. Notable specimens include a nearly complete short-necked plesiosaur, Dolichorhynchops ''osborni; three new species of invertebrates -- Pecten bonneri, Niobrarateuthis bonneri, and Enchoteuthus melanae. A new fish genus occupying the bottom-feeding niche in the Niobrara Cretaceous, called Bonnerichthys gladius, was described 18 years after Bonner’s death. Other notable finds from the Kansas Cretaceous include the most complete Hesperornis regalis specimen and the most complete Platecarpus'' mosasaur. In 1982, Bonner collected a "fish-within-a-fish", similar to the famous fossil collected by George Sternberg on display at the Sternberg Museum. The Bonner fish-within-a-fish is on display at the Royal Tyrell Museum of Paleontology.Exhibitions
In the 1980s and 1990s, the Los Angeles museum displayed Bonner's Kansas fossils on a wall titled "The Bonner Collection," which is now housed in the display and research areas and titled Kansas Seaway, Late Cretaceous Marion C. Bonner Collection.In addition to the Sternberg and the LACM, institutions holding his fossils include the University of Kansas Museum of Natural History, the American Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum of Natural History, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and the Royal Tyrell Museum of Paleontology.