University of Tennessee’s oldest Vol is “Monty,”–an Edmontosaurus annectens.
The 2,400-pound, 24-foot-long bronze skeleton of the Edmontosaurus was installed in front of the museum in 2013 in honor of museum’s fiftieth anniversary celebration.
The Edmontosaurus is a hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur, and these types of dinosaurs once roamed the coastal plains of Tennessee. The McClung Museum also houses actual hadrosaur bones—the only non-avian dinosaur bones ever found in the state—in its Geology and Fossil History of Tennessee permanent exhibit.
Thriving in the late Cretaceous period about 66 to 65 million years ago, the Edmontosaurus was a large, plant-eating dinosaur with powerful legs, hoof-like nails, and a leathery hide with zebra-like patterning on the tail. It could run on two legs or walk on four legs, weighed approximately 7,000 to 8,000 pounds and reached up to 40 feet in length.
The actual fossilized dinosaur that the museum’s bronze cast is based upon was discovered in South Dakota in 1995 by paleontologists. That Edmontosaurus probably died of wounds sustained after being attacked and bitten on the throat, possibly by a Tyrannosaurus rex.