In my travels, I’ve several times driven past signs pointing me to Big Bone Lick State Park, so on my way north for some house hunting I decided to stop for a visit.  In addition to the funny name, it also has a quite interesting history, and is worth looking up.  The Wikipedia page is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bone_Lick_State_Park

Although small, the museum was interesting, and there were a few excellent fossils, including this mastodon skull discovered there.

Harlan’s Ground Sloth, also found at the Lick, was exceptionally large!  For scale, I could easily fit inside it’s rib cage, the rope around it was about hip high.

The park gets its name from the salt springs and licks in the area.  Animals would come for salt, and end up getting stuck in bogs and mud.  Indian tribes who harvested salt there were aware of the bones, and Lewis and Clark also spent some time there, and sent sample bones back to Washington DC.  This diorama demonstrating a mastodon and bison stuck in the mud was a bit… disturbing.  It illustrates the point well, but I’m not sure that the entrails were really necessary…

I walked down to the salt springs and could easily see the crust of salt on the surface.  The site is easily reached by water, as it’s located on Big Bone Creek, a tributary of the Ohio River.

Years ago I read a book called “Follow the River” about Mary Draper Ingles, a woman who was taken captive by the Shawnee Indians.  She escaped and followed the Ohio River back home, nearly starving on the way.  It never occurred to me that there was a connection to Big Bone Lick, until I read that this was the spot where she escaped, while part of a work party harvesting salt.

Interestingly, Big Bone Lick State Park has a little captive herd of bison.  Since I’ve become rather fascinated with them since being back in the US, I went to take a look.

There were certainly a lot of signs telling me to be cautious, and large fences to keep me out, or keep them in, depending on who needs protection from whom!

But they were a ways away in a field, so this is the closest I got to them.  Not exactly like the ones standing in the road in the Badlands of South Dakota, or in Yellowstone, but still it’s nice to see them there.