Paleontology in Tennessee
During the mid-to-late Carboniferous, the state became a swampy environment, home to a rich variety of plants including ferns and scale trees.
Climate cooled until the Ice Age, when the state was home to Camelops, horses, mammoths, mastodons, and giant ground sloths.
In 1920, after local fossils became a subject of formal scientific study, a significant discovery of a variety of Pleistocene creatures was made near Nashville.
During the early part of the Paleozoic, Tennessee was located at the southern edge of North America, but still covered in seawater.
Decatur and Benton Counties preserve the remains of creatures like brachiopods, which are the most common, many bryozoans, crinoids, two favosites, and two tetracorals.
One survey documented at least 99 species of Early Devonian invertebrate in the state's Birdsong shale, of these 66 were shared with contemporary deposits in New York.
[6] Among Middle Devonian life documented by Tennessee's fossil record, a small variety of brachiopods are most common.
The contemporary local swamps were densely vegetated with a flora that included horsetails and scale trees.
[1] The rich vegetation growing during this interval of time left behind a great abundance of fossils in what are now the rocks of the Cumberland Plateau.
[1] 75 million year ago, the area around what is now Coon Creek was just off the coast of a Late Cretaceous sea.
Vertebrate life included mosasaurs,[9] sea turtles, and representatives of seven major groups of fish.
[11] Western Tennessee was also submerged by tropical seawater at times during the ensuing Tertiary period of the Cenozoic era.
[1] Early Tertiary plant remains from western Tennessee indicate that at the time the region had a tropical climate similar to that of modern Central or South America.
In response to the disturbance, a gigantic lizard emerged from the hole in the tree and dragged the boy inside.
[14] Norman Littlebear is a Yuchi-Shawnee elder who interprets the monstrous lizard in the tale as a dinosaur being described in terms that would have been familiar to the Yuchi.
These stories about gigantic ancient reptiles now attributed to dinosaurs may be evidence that Yuchi medicine men once encountered the Cretaceous fossils preserved west of the Mississippi River while on vision quests.
Following the release of Jurassic Park to theatres the Yuchi people have replaced the phrase giant lizard with dinosaur.
When the Yuchi attended the opening of the Oklahoma Natural History Museum they identified Saurophaganax maximus as the giant lizard of their traditions.
[16] Among the important early fossil discoveries in Tennessee was a possible candidate for the first known occurrence of amber discovered in the 1800s near Savannah.
