Recently, an 11-year-old girl spotted a 475-million-year-old fossil when she was walking along the shore of Douglas Lake. To get confirmation, her family reached out to Colin Sumrall, an associate professor of paleobiology in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Sumrall says the girl found a trilobite, an extinct marine arthropod that lived in water around East Tennessee, millions of years ago.
Several local and national outlets featured the story including Time, Fox News, Newsweek, WATE-TV Channel 6, and USA Today.