Gray, Tenn. — When highway construction workers shoveled into a dark, mucky deposit amid the red clay fields of East Tennessee, they knew they’d unearthed something unusual.
Maybe not unusual enough to stop the expansion of the state highway that winds just past the discovery but worth calling in specialists to evaluate.
The specialists dug up an alligator skull. In the southern Appalachians. And the new road took a detour.
What the experts found was evidence of a site estimated to be 4.5 million to 7 million years old, filled with thousands of animal and plant fossils preserved in a series of sinkholes. The Miocene-era fossils included a red panda, only the second found in the United States; a saber-toothed cat; a camel; and a shovel-tusked elephant. The Gray Fossil Site is the largest Miocene discovery in the eastern United States.
The past is never far away in this part of northeast Tennessee, where Daniel Boone blazed a trail that carried hundreds of thousands of settlers into the Western frontier and an annual storytelling festival celebrates generations of folklore and tall tales. The fossil find adds another dimension. It will take about 100 years to excavate the 5-acre site, with its fossil-rich clay deposit that’s 100 feet deep.
A natural history museum that opened in 2007 lets visitors get close to prehistory. Just a tiny portion of the site has been explored, and in warmer months East Tennessee State University paleontology students and staff excavate a pit that’s already produced several rhinoceroses. Visitors can help sift soil for small fossils, a process much like gem mining.
Inside, the museum is filled with interactive exhibits at which younger children can explore a faux fossil pit and older visitors can listen to prehistoric weather and traffic reports from the sinkhole. Casts of the animal finds populate a forest setting. The real bones are stored upstairs, where a guided tour lets visitors peer through windows at workers painstakingly cleaning and piecing together bone fragments and skeletons.
An exhibit that runs Jan. 24-May 17 focuses on extinction, from dinosaurs to currently endangered species, including the tapir. That animal, an ungainly piglike creature with a short trunk for a nose, is still found in Asia and Central and South America. It once roamed extensively over this part of Tennessee; the remains of some 100 tapirs have been dug up at Gray.
The museum was built on top of some of the fossil-rich clay, which was quickly excavated before construction. In the spring, construction starts on a cafe and indoor and outdoor classrooms.
The Gray site is about an hour west of Asheville and just a few miles from Tennessee’s Tri-Cities: Johnson City, Bristol and Kingsport.
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