Big Bone an Official Landmark
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009Big Bone Lick State Park has been named a National Natural Landmark (NNL), the National Park Service announced today. The park joins an elite group of 586 sites across the United States that have received NNL status. The program began 1962 to recognize and preserve important natural history sites.
Big Bone is one of four sites added today to the NNL program. The others sites are: Nottingham Park Serpentine Barrens in Pennsylvania, Cave Without a Name in Texas, and the Chazy Fossil Reef in Vermont and New York.
A National Park Service press release says: “Big Bone Lick in Boone County, Kentucky is unique for its combination of salt springs and associated Late Pleistocene bone beds. The site has been referred to as the birthplace of vertebrate paleontology in North America. The Big Bone fossils played a very important role in the development of scientific thought regarding the idea of extinction and the relationship of geology and paleontology.”
