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Fossil collection on display at D&E

Submitted photo Mammoth vertebrae are among the more than 300 Pleistocene epoch animal fossils on display in the Reckling Collection in The Stirrup Gallery at Davis & Elkins College.

Submitted photo Mammoth vertebrae are among the more than 300 Pleistocene epoch animal fossils on display in the Reckling Collection in The Stirrup Gallery at Davis & Elkins College.

ELKINS — A new addition to The Stirrup Gallery at Davis & Elkins College recalls the Pleistocene epoch thousands of years ago when mastodons, wooly mammoths and Irish elk roamed the earth. Fossils of these now extinct massive animals, known as megafauna, make up the Reckling Collection currently on display.

“I’m ecstatic,” Mark Lanham, coordinator of special collections at D&E, said of the collection, said. “Everyone loves dinosaurs and there are a lot of museums where you can see their fossils. These fossils we have are of the animals that inhabited the planet right after the dinosaur extinction.”

Included among the more than 300 fossils are mastodon and wooly mammoth jawbones, teeth and vertebrae, wooly rhinoceros femur and teeth, Irish elk skull caps and antlers and extinct stingray spines. Although many of these animal species lived in North America, the fossils on exhibit were recovered in the Siberian permafrost and the Doggerland, an area beneath the North Sea.

The collection was named to honor the late Jerry Reckling, a resident of Baltimore, Md., who visited Elkins often and left the fossils to the College in his will.

“He used to spend summers at Augusta (Heritage Center) and he’d bring by fossils to show me,” Lanham explained, adding that Reckling had been a friend of The Stirrup Gallery since it opened in 2013.

An official grand opening of the Reckling Collection and memorial service for Reckling are planned for fall, with a specific date yet to be determined.

“We’ve had a couple of grade school tours and other visitors, and they’ve loved it,” Lanham said. “It’s a good way to learn about the environment and geography.”

With the addition of the Reckling Collection, artifacts in The Stirrup Gallery now span 1.2 million years. Additional collections are: The Darby Collection, Howard-Sudbrink Collection, Foster Collection, Senator Davis Collection, Swezy Collection, Gary North Collection and J. Richard and Dotty S. Kendig Collection.

The Stirrup Gallery, located in Myles Center for the Arts on the Davis & Elkins College campus, is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and evenings and weekends by appointment. For additional information, call Lanham at 304-637-1980 or 304-642-6705 or visit www.dewv.edu/arts-entertainment/stirrup-gallery.

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