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Gray Fossil Site
The Gray Fossil Site at 25 years
(May 31, 2025) Many new fossil preparations, mounts and displays are installed. Most of the fossils held bythe University of Tennessee McClung Museum in Knoxville, as well as the material stored byTDOT at the Strawberry Plains exit have been repatriated to the Museum.
The slope above the fossil site was recently cleared of substantial vegetation growth. With the wide availability of broadband, these photos have some extra resolution.
Looking towards the newer Annex from behind the main Museum building. The black sheeting covers a shallow excavation into disturbed Gray site sediments. Yellow bags are material waiting to be screened and searched.
Volunteer excavators working sediments.
Bone materialbeing exposed among large dolomite boulders, all in original in-situ positions.
Teleoceras rhinoceros lower jaw and partial skull, on display in the laboratory.
Lower jaw and teeth. Compare teeth with the specimen in the archival cabinet, several photos down.
Detail of tusks, with wear resulting in razor sharp edges.
Partial mastodon skull reconstructed onto mesh and butvar frame. This is the same one seen in 2017, when it was as in the foreground photos.
Teeth in position relative to the rest of the skull, from the side.
Storeroom and steel archival cabinets.
Matthew Inabinett, Collections Manager, shows a cabinet devoted to a single Teleoceras individual.
Rhino lower jaw in the cabinet. Note the difference in the tooth (molar) shape between this individual and the one on the desk in the lab.
Mastodon femurs.
One of the very few fossils representing a saber-toothed cat discovered so far.
Mastodon jaw, and what can be learned of this individual and its history.
New life-posed red panda mount, posed descending (not ascending as in this rotated photo) the tree limb in the reconstruction.
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Articulated skeleton of a young tapir, preserved in archival jacket.
It's turtles all the way down at the Gray Site. The display also explains how 3-D copies, and modern analogs are used in reconstructing the fauna.
Again, the museum also curates and displays material from the Saltville, Virginia archaeological and fossil site. This site, about 52 miles to the northeast has been known since Thomas Jefferson's time and yielded fossils suspected (by some, now controversial) of being butchered by early Native Americans.
Fossils from Pleistocene age Saltville, Virginia occurrence.
Skulls of Dire Wolf, Gray Wolf, Coyote, and little puppy dog for comparison, and mammoth ankle bones from Saltville.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltville_(archaeological_site)
Museum in Saltville, VA: https://museumofthemiddleappalachians.org/exhibits/
McDonald, Jerry N. 2000. An Outline of the Pre-Clovis Archeology of SV-2, Saltville, Virginia, with Special Attention to a Bone Tool
Dated 14,510 yr BP.
https://www.vmnh.net/content/vmnh/uploads/PDFs/research_and_collections/jeffersoniana/jeffersoniana_number_9.pdf
