Finding a fossil in Kansas City can be as easy as going to ... if you get a bit luckier, you can find crinoids ... and trilobites," he said. There's also a good chance of finding fossils of ...

Yet for millennia, Kansas has been a dry, sometimes even dusty, place. The ocean is long gone, but traces of that long-ago aquatic life lie right below your feet captured for the ages in fossil form.

Buckland noticed that these crinoid fossils were attached to small pieces of driftwood we call lenses, which had turned into coal. He hypothesised that the crinoids had been attached to the ...