Big Bone Lick

The name is literal and it is the whole point. Big Bone Lick is where the enormous bones came from.

Water flowing through the limestone and shale under Boone County, Kentucky, dissolves the salts trapped in those formations and carries them to the surface as brine springs. Animals need salt, so for tens of thousands of years the herds came to these springs to lick the ground, and a good many of them died in the surrounding swamps. What accumulated is one of the richest Pleistocene megafauna deposits in North America.

Mammoths were the draw, and mastodons, but the list of animals that grazed the salty ground here is far longer: bison, caribou, deer, elk, horse, musk ox, peccary, ground sloths, wolves, black bears, stag moose, sabre-toothed cats and possibly tapir. Most of the fossils date to the Wisconsin Glacial Period, between roughly 115,000 and 11,700 years ago. Human burials and other signs of habitation have been found here too.

The original inhabitants of the area knew about the lick and its bones long before any of it was written down, and the site is often described as the birthplace of American vertebrate palaeontology, because it was from here that bones went east and to Europe and forced naturalists to confront the idea that whole kinds of animal had ceased to exist.

It is a state historic site now, with a museum holding fossils from the deposit, a bison herd on the property, and trails through the springs and the bone beds. Admission to the grounds is free.