Seeking Behemoth: Detour 1: Big Bone Lick State Park, KY

Because of the way the United States is, most of the material in the east is Cenozoic (that is, from after the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago.) In fact, because so much was ocean and later on so much got covered in glaciers, this side of Ashfall doesn't have a ton of fossils to start with except for odd areas here and there.

Well, while researching potential routes, I came across Big Bone Lick. Famous for being the birth place of vertebrate paleontology in the USA (debatable, as always...), it is a site that was excavated by Clark (under orders by President Jefferson) in 1807, after the famous expedition by him and Lewis a few years earlier. Jefferson knew that Europe had found fossils of large animals, and as a matter of pride he was determined to find some for his own country (or at least, have someone find some for his country.) He had earlier found the claw of Megalonyx jeffersonii, and thought it was a large lion's tooth (it turned out to be a species of giant ground sloth) Jefferson went to his deathbed believing that extinction was not possible, and that all animals in the fossil record were somewhere in the unexplored parts of the world. This belief was part of his reason for sending out Lewis and Clark in the first place. While they did find fossils out there (probably dinosaurs in the Hell Creek Formation), they were not able to bring them back.

Don't get me wrong. Jefferson was a great scientist and naturalist. He was very observant and very curious about the world around him and made a lot of contributions to science (including a fairly large collection of fossils.)

Because the area was covered in ocean during the Ordovician,
salt deposited when the sea receded and creatures were attracted
to these deposits during the Pleistocene millions of years later. Even
the paleoindians harvested these deposits.

A model of Pleistocene animals stuck
in the marshy ground.

Anyway, so Big Bone Lick is a site that dates back to the Pleistocene, after the last ice age. The ground was very wet at the time, and animals were drawn to the water, plants, and salt deposits in the area (for the record, if you want to watch deer in your back yard, get a salt lick and watch from a distance. Animals actually need some amount of salt in their bodies, and are attracted to deposits of it.) These salt deposits in particular were left over from when the area was covered in the Ordovician (450 million years ago). Well, large animals, such as mammoths, mastodons, and bison don't mix well with squishy ground, and they often got stuck in the marshy ground. Sad for them, but fortunate for paleontologists, because this did a relatively good job of preserving their story.

Mastodon skull and material. Today the closest
(and only) relatives of these live in Africa and Asia.

Well, these populations are no longer in abundance in this areas (although the park is working on reviving the bison population through breeding, as they were driven off more recently by hunters). Mastodons and mammoths were killed off by a changing climate (and especially by changing food sources), with potentially the last of the suffering population being picked off by the hungry paleoindian (though likely a thriving population would have withstood this.)

Bringing back the bison (NOT buffalo)

As a paleontological/archeological site (the animals interacted with humans and thus there is research interest in both fields here), scientists wait for more remains to be washed out by the creek. The museum's most recent exhibit featured a dig from 2007. If there is an active site today, its not open to viewing on any of the paths that we explored. A fair warning, while the area is drier than it was in the Pleistocene, the minerals in the water still smell a bit and the paths are slick after a heavy rain. Makes it fairly easy to emphasize with the ancient creatures.