Big Bone Lick
Mastodon humerus (upper arm bone) (after Cuvier, 1825)
Famous for its Ice Age (Pleistocene) mammalian fossils, Big Bone Lick is located on a tributary of the Ohio River in Boone County, Kentucky, about 20 miles southwest of Cincinnati Ohio. It's the first major New World fossil locality known to Europeans. It's also among the first scientifically significant fossil localities known from anywhere.
Big Bone Lick shown in a detail
from a 1793 map of Kentucky
Baron Charles de Lougueuil, the commander of a French military expedition, may have been the first European to visit the site in 1739 (1). He collected some mastodon fossils that were later studied by two French naturalists, Daubenton and Buffon in Paris.
Word of the locality spread in the ensuing decades and hundreds if not thousands of specimens were collected from the site during the 18th century. Some scientifically significant specimens found their way into French, British or American collections, but most appeared to have been lost forever.
In 1807, at the behest of Thomas Jefferson, William Clark (of Lewis & Clark fame) conducted a major collecting expedition at Big Bone Lick that yielded about 300 specimens, most of which can still be found either at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris or the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia (2). Most of the scientific work on Big Bone Lick fossils has been based either on the Clark-Jefferson collections and on a few other specimens collected in the early 19th century. It wouldn't be until the 1960s that significant quantities of Ice Age (Pleistocene) mammals would again be collected at the site (3).
Big Bone Lick is a swampy area surrounding salt and sulfur springs. These springs have attracted wildlife, livestock, Native Americans and white settlers during historical times and large numbers of wild animals during the prehistoric Recent and Pleistocene Epochs (4). Most of the sediments at Big Bone Lick were deposited about 18,500 years ago (Wisconsinian glacial age, Late Pleistocene). A glacial advance choked the nearby Ohio River with glacial outwash. This in turn forced sediment-rich floodwaters from to Ohio to back up into Big Bone Valley. Cycles of erosion and deposition along Big Bone Lick Creek have since reworked the area, exposing some of the Pleistocene fossils found by human visitors.
Excavations during the 1960s have yielded human artifacts and the bones of livestock and recent wildlife in some of the upper layers, while a rich assemblage of large Pleistocene mammals were found further down. These Pleistocene animals include American mastodon (Mammut americanum), mammoth (Mammuthus sp), Harlan's musk-ox (Bootherium bombifrons), stag moose (Cervalces scotti), a ground sloth (Mylodon sp.) an extinct bison (Bison antiquus), an extinct horse (Equus cf. E. complicatus), deer and caribou. Earlier accounts including the results of the 1807 Clark-Jefferson expedition and a faunal list presented by Jillson (1936) indicated that the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), Columbia mammoth (Mammuthus columbi), Harlan's ground sloth (Paramylodon harleni), Jefferson ground sloth (Megalonyx jeffersonii) and a bear (Ursus sp.) have also been found at Big Bone Lick.
Big Bone Lick became part of the Kentucky State Park System in 1960. It has recently been recognized by the U.S. National Park Service as part of the Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail.
Mastodon tusk (after Cuvier, 1825)
Websites:
- Friends of Big Bone:
www.friendsofbigbone.org/index.htm
- Kentucky State Parks website on Big Bone Lick:
parks.ky.gov/stateparks/bb/index.htm - National Park Service - Lewis & Clark Expedition web page on Big Bone Lick:
www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/lewisandclark/bbo.htm
Print Resources:
- Cuvier, Georges. 1825. Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles : où l'on rétablit les charactères de plusieurs animaux dont les révolutions du globe ont détruit les espèces. Paris: G. Dufour et E. d'Ocagne.
- Jillson, W. R. 1936. Big Bone Lick. An outline of its history, geology and paleontology. Standard Printing Company, Louisville, Kentucky (Big Bone Lick Association Publication No. 1), xvi + 164 p.
- Kurtén, B. and E. Anderson. 1980. Pleistocene Mammals of North America. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Lang, I.A. 2002. Ice Age Mammals of North America: A Guide to the Big, the Hairy, and the Bizarre. Missoula: Mounain Press.
- Schultz, C. Bertrand, Lloyd G. Tanner, Frank C. Whitmore, Jr. Louis L. Ray, and Ellis C. Crawford, 1963. "Paleontologic investigation at Big Bone Lick State Park, Kentucky: A preliminary report." Science 142(3596): 1167-1169.
Notes:
- Most authorities assume that Lougueuil did visit Big Bone Lick, but the American paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson concluded that Lougueuil probably found his mastodon fossils at another locality further downstream the Ohio River. Instead, Simpson regards an account by Christopher Geist —written in 1751 and published in 1893— to be the earliest European record of the famous locality. [go back]
- Clark's specimens made their way to Thomas Jefferson in Washington, DC. The collection was then divided into three parts. Some went to the American Philosophical Society and ultimately became part of the Thomas Jefferson Fossil Collection at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Another part was donated to theNational Museum of Natural History in Paris, while the rest became part of Jefferson's personal collection. (See Discovering the Mastodon - Part 8: Fossils in the White House for more information.) [go back]
- The University of Nebraska conducted geological and paleontological studies at Big Bone Lick during the mid-1960s in cooperation with the Kentucky Department of Parks. [go back]
- Natural salt licks attract wildlife because they provide minerals that are typically deficient in their diets. Some salt licks have resulted in fossil accumulations, most notably in the Great Lakes region of North America. A percentage of the fossils collected as such sites are the result of animals becoming trapped in wetlands surrounding the licks, while others result from other types of mortality (predation, disease, etc.). Since the animals may come from considerable distances, the species found at the lick may not be fully representative of the local fauna. [go back]