Big Bone Lick (older cycle)

Animals came to the springs for salt for thousands of years. During the Ice Age, mastodons, mammoths and other large animals left bones in the soft ground. Shawnee, Delaware and other Native peoples hunted game and gathered salt there.

In 1739, a French expedition under Charles le Moyne, the second Baron de Longueuil, stopped on its way down the Ohio. Native hunters brought them fossil bones and teeth, and Longueuil carried some to France. Those specimens were among the first New World fossils that European scientists studied, and some are still in Paris.

Collectors kept coming. Meriwether Lewis gathered fossils there in 1803, but they were lost when the boat carrying them sank. In 1807, President Thomas Jefferson sent William Clark to dig at the lick. That dig is counted as the first organized vertebrate fossil excavation in the United States, and Jefferson displayed some of the bones in the White House.

Salt was boiled at the springs into the early 1800s, and by 1821 the lick was also a resort. Today it is Big Bone Lick State Historic Site.

Sources: National Park Service, Paleontology and Geology of Big Bone Lick National Natural Landmark (opens in a new tab); National Park Service, Big Bone Lick State Historic Site (opens in a new tab)