By MIKE CORN

mcorn@dailynews.net

DORRANCE -- Never mind the cold, rainy weather, there was a fossil to be found.

So Mike Everhart and a fossil-aficionado-in-training anxiously chipped away at the soft limestone under a rock overhang last week at a rock outcropping alongside a roadway leading into Wilson Lake.

It was a Xiphactinus, a fierce fish that lived millions of years ago in the Cretaceous sea that once covered much of Kansas.

With only a few vertebrae in hand, Everhart -- associate curator of paleontology at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Hays -- said it likely would be 14 to 15 feet long.

And old.

"This is fencepost limestone," he said, pointing to the foot-thick overhang immediately above the spot where he was digging. "So we're talking 90 (million) to 95 million years old."

Many of the Xiphactinus found in Gove County, for example, are closer to 60 million years old.

Pulling out a vertebrae, Everhart was sure that the fossil was that of a Xiphactinus.

Everhart took to the field Oct. 12 to get friend Lee Garrison into the field, and into fossils.

Garrison currently is serving in the Army, stationed at Fort Riley and is intensely interested in fossils.

"My interest in fossils led me to find his Web site out there," Garrison said of Everhart, who maintains an extensive Web site at oceansofkansas.com.

As he surveyed the site, Everhart knew he had a big fish, but knew that a mountain of overburden -- soil and rock -- covered the fossilized remains.

Initially, he thought the head was somewhere in the hillside, the tail "long gone" as a result of erosion.

After cleaning up what he recovered, back in Derby where he lives, Everhart changed his mind, and said the tail would have been under the rock, the head weathered away.

Just the same, he knew there was simply too much rock to remove for a specimen that had already partially weathered away.

"I'm going to pull out on the next vertebrae and call it good," he said.

Had there been any hope of finding a complete specimen, he might have stuck around.

"They're fairly rare in this part of the state," Everhart said.