Construction continues on the visitor center at the Gray Fossil Site even as paleontologists continue to unearth new findings.
The 32,500-square-foot facility is being built upon the very ground that surrendered fossils nearly 5 million years old. Everything from alligators to red pandas to fossilized fish remains has been uncovered, but the roughly five-acre site is far from finished in terms of yielding more fossils.
“I think they literally feel like they’ve just scratched the surface,” said Bill Rasnick, associate vice president of facilities management planning and construction.
“We spent the majority of the summer, eight hours a day, five days a week digging at the site,” said Troy Halliburton, student and volunteer surveyor at the fossil site.
While the construction of a visitor center on such scientifically precious ground was an initial concern, the building is nearing completion on a corner of the fossil area deemed to be least intrusive upon future digs. The visitors center targets mainly a younger audience with an interactive approach to teaching hands-on science.
“It’s not just that you’ll get to go there and look at fossils; you’ll get to interact,” said Jeremy Ross, associate vice president of university advancement.
University Advancement’s Reaching Higher Needs Capital Campaign is currently working with the Gray Fossil Site to raise the remaining $1.5 million needed to complete construction. Although the site was awarded an $8 million federal grant, such grants only cover 80 percent of the awarded amount and leave the remaining 20 percent to be funded by the grant recipient.
For the moment, however, no worries are being voiced concerning the budget gap. Rasnick claims the visitor center project is “within budget.” With funding for a web camera rumored to already be in place, the future of the visitors center would seem to be fiscally sound.
“There’s never enough money to do everything you want to, but I certainly think this project has been well-funded,” Rasnick said.
“We feel like we’ve had a great project and gotten a lot for our money.”
The digging continues. Meanwhile ETSU paleon-tologists and paleobotanists prepare to move their laboratory of fossil fragments from the basement of Brown Hall to the new facility at Gray. Quite a bit of the digging, it turns out, goes on in the fossil lab where dirt-encrusted fossil remains are brought in for their final cleaning.
“If we had found an elephant this summer I don’t know where we would have put it; we don’t have room here,” said preparator Jeff Supplee of the department of physics, astronomy and geology.
Although moving hoards of bagged fossils is no easy task, ETSU faculty and volunteers seem to be embracing the change with open arms. “It will be wonderful,” Supplee said. “There’s a lot of stuff we just can’t do . don’t have the room for here.”
Although the visitor center is due to open in spring of 2007, the digging will continue well into the future.

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