The spider hung from a leafy tree branch. It was bright green, and it brandished a giant claw designed to attack the insects on which it fed. Staring at the creature through the glowing light of her headlamp, Rosemary Gillespie (Knoxville ’86) could hardly believe her eyes. There was only one spider in the world with a claw quite like that—the rarely encountered Doryonychus raptor, which had been scientifically collected only once, by an obscure British naturalist in 1901.
It was an unforgettable moment. As he knelt in a pile of damp, moldy leaves in the heart of Tennessee’s majestic Smoky Mountains, Dennis Desjardin (Knoxville ’89) got the surprise of a lifetime when he realized that some of the tan-and-gold–patterned leaves on which he was kneeling weren’t really leaves--they were actually a pair of copperheads.
