Natchez Trace Parkway and Natchez Trace National Scenic Trail: Paleontological resource inventory (sensitive version)

Hodnett, John-Paul; Boensch, Deanna; Smith, Christina; Tweet, Justin; Santucci, Vincent

doi:10.36967/2299391

The Natchez Trace Parkway (NATR), which also manages or is associated with Brices Cross Roads National Battlefield (BRCR), Natchez Trace National Scenic Trail (NATT), and Tupelo National Battlefield (TUPE), is a 715-km (444-mi)-long trail of deep time that crosses through rocks and deposits ranging in age from the Late Ordovician (458 million years ago) to the late Pleistocene (approximately 10,000 years ago), beginning just south of Nashville, Tennessee, cutting through the northwest corner of Alabama, and then crossing much of Mississippi into Natchez. The earliest report of fossils from the NATR region comes from Natchez, Mississippi, where Scottish geologist Sir Charles Lyell in 1849 documented that large Pleistocene mammals and snails were being collected from the loess and blue-gray clays within the city while he was visiting in 1846. Years later, these Pleistocene mammalian fossils were scientifically described by one of the first American vertebrate paleontologists, Joseph Leidy of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and included the first fossils of the giant cat, Panthera atrox. There are also anecdotal accounts of fossil oysters being collected either in or close to the boundaries of NATR and put on display at the Choctaw Agency along the historic Natchez Trace in the early 1800s. Beyond these early accounts of fossils collected near NATR, the first major collections of fossils from NATR proper were made in the late 1950s to early 1960s by NATR staff naturalist and geologists Donald Black and Guy Thompson, who collected extensively from Cretaceous rocks just south of Tupelo, Mississippi, and Ordovician rocks in Tennessee. Black also wrote some of the first summaries of the regional geology and paleontology of NATR in the early 1960s. Also in the mid-20th century, fossil samples were collected from NATR by the Mississippi Geologic Survey and the Mississippi State University at Cretaceous sites near Houston, Mississippi, and at Twentymile Bottom Overlook. Additional paleontological work was later conducted at the Garrison Creek Picnic Area, looking at the Late Ordovician fossils present there to better understand ancient community structures of invertebrate animals and how they shift with time. Museum repositories outside of NATR with fossils from the NATR region include the Academy of Natural Sciences, Dunn-Seiler Museum, Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, and the Mississippi Geological Survey, and Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

Natchez Trace Parkway and Natchez Trace National Scenic Trail: Paleontological resource inventory (sensitive version)

Series