Thomas Jefferson & Ben Franklin Studied Fossils at Big Bone
Big Bone Lick is one of the most famous paleontological sites in North America. Vast numbers of bones were collected throughout the mid 1700’s and transported to museums throughout the world.
In 1807, President Thomas Jefferson commissioned Captain William Clark to excavate bones from Big Bone Lick for scientific study. This made Big Bone Lick the first official paleontological collecting site in North America. Collected bones made their way to museums throughout the world and into Jefferson’s Monticello home in Virginia, where the bones can still be viewed today. The discovery of "elephant" bones at Big Bone Lick was one of the reasons that Thomas Jefferson sent explorers westward to Kentucky and beyond in hopes of discovering new species.
Because the bones from Big Bone Lick were different than bones of modern elephants, Benjamin Franklin and other scientists began to question the changes that must have occurred in the Earth’s past to render these animals extinct. Eventually they learned these big bones belonged to mammoths and mastodons, two types of extinct elephants.
Read more at Kentucky Geological Survey
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