Chasing History’s Finds in Field Featured at Smoky Mountain Relic Room

Based in Tennessee, Chase Pipes guides the Smoky Mountain Relic Room in Sevierville and maintains an extensive collection of fossils, artifacts, and minerals. As featured in Knox News, Chase Pipes documents his journeys into the field seeking historical and prehistoric finds in Chasing History, an educational series on YouTube.

As he describes it in the episode “Fossils Are NOT Rare,” the purpose of the series is to take viewers beyond the types of computer generated images that populate movies such as Jurassic Park. Along with fellow dinosaur fossil collector Tyree Lamph, he shows how examples of ancient life are embedded in the fossil record in layers of rock representing specific epochs, and how these can be responsibly dug out and preserved.

Featured examples of such fossil discoveries on display in the Smoky Mountain Relic Room include an intact imprint of a trilobite found in Africa and dating back more than 400 million years.

Now extinct, these resilient arthropods lived in the oceans and are thought to be relatives of today’s horseshoe crab. Having carved out an ecological niche for some 300 million years, they were decimated in a mass extinction event that engulfed the globe some 252 million years in the past.