Big Bone Lick Research Articles

Complete genome sequence of Bacillus pumilus F12-21, a halotolerant bacterium with antibacterial properties isolated from a Big Bone Lick State Park salt spring.

Bacillus pumilus F12-21 is a halotolerant bacterium isolated from a sulfur-enriched salt spring. F12-21 inhibits bacteria of human health interest and bacterial salt spring co-inhabitants. We report the genome of Bacillus pumilus F12-21, with a predicted genome of 3.77 Mbp containing 3,732 protein-coding genes, 80 tRNAs, and 24 rRNAs.

Is the damage worth it? Testing handheld XRF as a non-destructive analytical tool for determining biogenic bone and tooth chemistry prior to destructive analyses

Isotopic analysis is destructive and requires that a specimen retains its original (biogenic) chemical composition. A specimen's relative abundance of calcium and phosphorous (Ca/P) or carbonate and phosphate (CO3/PO4) is often used to assess preservation. If a specimen's Ca/P or CO3/PO4 is similar to modern specimens, a specimen's isotopic composition may be biogenic. However, most methods for measuring these proxies are destructive. Moreover the relationships between Ca/P, CO3/PO4 and isotopic preservation are poorly established. In this study, we assessed the ability of handheld X-ray fluorescence (hXRF) to non-destructively evaluate a specimen's preservation by characterizing the calcium to phosphorous ratio (Ca/P). We first established that surface Ca/P (Ca/Psurface) for modern specimens was consistent with expectations for unaltered bone (1.3–2.3). Several specimens had slightly larger ratios, suggesting the currently accepted range may need to be expanded. Second, we tested the ability of Ca/Psurface to detect alteration using twenty Quaternary mammal teeth from Big Bone Lick, Kentucky. Ten specimens had Ca/Psurface between 1.3 and 2.3 and ten had larger ratios, suggesting alteration. Because most methods measure Ca/P in powder (Ca/Ppowder), we compared Ca/Psurface, Ca/Ppowder, and the enamel subsurface (Ca/Psubsurface). With two exceptions, Ca/Psubsurface and Ca/Ppowder were below 2.3, regardless of Ca/Psurface, suggesting that Ca/Ppowder and Ca/Psubsurface underestimate alteration. We next compared Ca/Psurface, CO3/PO4, and carbon (δ13C) and oxygen (δ18O) isotope values for the fossil teeth. Fourteen specimens were identified as altered or unaltered by both proxies, but six specimens only had one altered proxy. Specimens with both proxies altered had lower, less variable δ13C values than specimens with both proxies unaltered. Median δ18O values were similar between these groups. Individuals with altered Ca/Psurface but unaltered CO3/PO4 isotopically resembled specimens with both proxies altered. Conversely, specimens with unaltered Ca/Psurface and altered CO3/PO4 were similar to specimens with both proxies unaltered. Notably, all individuals with both proxies altered had relatively low δ13C values, including a horse and mammoth, which are normally considered grazers (and therefore should have higher δ13C values). These and other altered specimens may be isotopically compromised. Overall, our results suggest that Ca/Psurface is effective at detecting alteration non-destructively, quickly, and affordably, making it an attractive approach for analyzing unique specimens.

Quaternary chronostratigraphy and stable isotope paleoecology of Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, USA

Big Bone Lick (BBL) in northern Kentucky, USA has been a critical geologic site in the historical development of North American Quaternary vertebrate paleontology since the 1700s. Sedimentology, geoarcheology, paleontology, accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence dating, and stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses were undertaken to develop a chronostratigraphy and history of erosion and deposition for the site to provide a foundation for understanding taphonomy, and species extinction and adaptation to periods of climatic and environmental change. Three geomorphic surfaces are recognized at BBL representing significant periods of floodplain aggradation since the last glacial maximum (26.5–19ka) dating to the Oldest Dryas (Tazewell, 25–19ka), the Older Dryas (Cary, 14–12ka), and late Holocene (5ka to the present). Unconformities suggest significant periods of degradation during the transitions from cold and dry to warm and moist climates from the Oldest Dryas (Tazewell) to Bølling Oscillation, from the Older Dryas (Cary) to the Allerød, and from the Younger Dryas (Valders) to the Holocene Climatic Optimum. Increased anthropogenic activities since ~5ka may have increased soil upland erosion and floodplain aggradation. Stable isotopes demonstrate that the landscape has been dominated by C3 vegetation since the last glacial maximum.

“Big Bone Lick,” “Big Talk,” and “Flush”

“Big Bone Lick,” “Big Talk,” and “Flush” Robert Morgan (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution “. . . the Indians said the peaks were talking to each other in the idiom that mountains use. . .” Pilot Mountain, North Carolina, photographed by AnDrew McKenzie, 2003, courtesy of a GNU Free Documentation License. [End Page 116] Big Bone Lick At Big Bone Lick the first explorers found skeletons of elephants they said, found ribs of wooly mammoths, tusks. They dug out teeth the size of bricks and skulls of giant bison, beavers. In salty mud licked bare by elk and deer and buffalo and bears for ten millennia, the bones seemed wreckage from a mighty dream, a graveyard from a golden age, or killing ground of titans. Here they saw the ruins of a world survived by its diminutives, where Eden once gave way and shrank to just a regular promised land to fit our deadly, human scale. Big Talk When mountains boomed and boomed again returning echoes all along the chain, the Indians said the peaks were talking to each other in the idiom that mountains use across the mighty distances with giant syllables and rests. White hunters feared it might be guns or even cannon natives had somehow acquired to warn them from the better hunting grounds and streams, the blasts as loud as thunder on the clearest days and coldest nights. Geologists would later hold the groans and barks inside the ridge were shelves of massive, restless rock that slipped or dropped far down within the mountains’ guts, a fracture or a crashing at some fault as part [End Page 117] of the tectonic conversation among the continents as old as planet earth or starry birth, the mutter of creation’s work. Flush A common sight in graveyards in the countryside’s the sunken grave. Though times may vary in each case the average age for graves to cave is roughly half a century. To compensate old folks would curve the dirt in mounds above the site. But after several years the box below gives way and heavy earth subsides, to settle, crush the whole container of remains, the dust of the beloved, as clay unites with clay. And what is seen above in turf ’s a new depression near the stone, a pool of absence filled by rain or snow or blowing leaves until the spot is flush again, until the human is replaced, with hill and wind and planet’s curve. [End Page 118] Robert Morgan Robert Morgan is a poet, novelist, and biographer. His most recent book is Boone: A Biography (2007), winner of the Kentucky Literary Award and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as an honorary degree from his alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Since 1971 he has taught at Cornell University, where he is now Kappa Alpha Professor of English. Copyright © 2011 Center for the Study of the American South

The Discovery of Fossil Vertebrates on Missouri's Western Frontier

Fossil-bearing sites containing predominantly mastodon, Mammut americanum, remains were discovered west of the Mississippi River on the Osage River in Upper Louisiana only a few decades after the discovery by Longueuil of similar remains at Big Bone Lick in Kentucky. The first excavations were conducted in the 1790s by Pierre Chouteau, a fur trader and member of the founding family of St Louis. Chouteau's work was documented by several early travelers, including Georges-Henri-Victor Collot and later by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, among others. It was from Chouteau's excavation that the first mastodon molar from west of the Mississippi River reached Baron Georges Cuvier in Paris, having been sent from Philadelphia by Benjamin Smith Barton. Early nineteenth-century travelers continued to mention the Osage River locality and, by 1816, William Clark displayed fossil specimens in his St Louis Museum. By 1840 the indefatigable fossil collector and museum entrepreneur, Albert C. Koch, began extensive digging in the Osage River basin along with sites in the Bourbeuse River valley and at Kimmswick along the Mississippi River in Missouri. Koch's extensive collection of mastodon bones enabled him to assemble a mounted specimen that he named the Missourium, an exaggerated and poorly reconstructed skeleton that was later identified and properly reassembled by Richard Owen at the British Museum. The specimen was later purchased by the trustees of that museum. The publicity surrounding Koch's work stimulated a veritable ‘bone rush’ to the Osage River in the years preceding the Civil War, with some of the fossils making their way into the collections of the American Philosophical Society and the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Following the Civil War, interest shifted to the Mississippi valley and the Kimmswick site just south of St Louis, where ongoing excavations became an attraction during the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis. C. W. Beehler, a St Louis resident, was responsible for the work, a venture that attracted scientists from the Smithsonian as well as other institutions. While none of the principals in the early exploration of fossil sites in Missouri had scientific training, the fact that their collections were passed on to scientific practitioners in Philadelphia, Washington, Paris, and London contributed to the expanding body of information that aided in the development of the field of vertebrate paleontology.

K. Thomson 2008. The Legacy of the Mastodon. The Golden Age of Fossils in America. xvii + 386 pp. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. Price £22.50 (hard covers). ISBN 9780 300 11704 2.

Those who perhaps have had only a fleeting association with any form of vertebrate palaeontology should not be dissuaded by the title of this book. Thomson carefully uses the initial discoveries of the massive fossil bones from the saline springs of Big Bone Lick, Kentucky in the 1750s to begin the chronology of many of the major North American vertebrate fossil finds up until the late 1890s. These were the bones which were only later referred to as those of the Mastodon (Mammut americanum). The resultant timeline not only charts the development of this branch of palaeontology in the fledgling American West, but introduces some key historic figures in the context of their expeditionary travels, institutional affiliations (or otherwise) and their inter-relationships (friends, foes, buyers and sellers). With far fewer active proponents of the science then than now, the boundaries between adherents of vertebrate and invertebrate palaeontology and palaeobotany were not nearly as proscriptive. Of course this did not prevent monumental rivalries between some competing figures, keen to make and retain their name with their scientific discoveries. Consequently, over half the book is given over to the detailing of the expeditions, rivalries and eventual feuds of the dinosaur hunters Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh.

Clovis and the American Mastodon at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky

Contemporaneity of people and the American mastodon (Mammut americanum) at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, has been extensively debated for more than two hundred years. Newly interpreted stratigraphic excavations and direct AMS ¹⁴C measurements on mastodon bones from Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, indicate that the megafauna are a palimpsest of fossils spanning at least 1,200 calendar years (11,020 ± 30 to 12,210 ± 35 RC yr B.P.). The radiocarbon evidence indicates that mastodons and Clovis people overlapped in time; however, other than one fossil with a possible cut mark and Clovis artifacts that are physically associated with but dispersed within the bone-bearing deposits, there is no incontrovertible evidence that humans hunted Mammut americanum at the site.

Big Bone Lick: the cradle of American paleontology

On March 7, 1808, President Thomas Jefferson received a long-awaited shipment of approximately 300 fossils from William Clark, who had just completed his westward expedition with Meriwether Lewis. The fossils were unearthed at Big Bone Lick in northern Kentucky, and over the years they had gained the interest of such prominent figures as Daniel Boone, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin. Jefferson's receipt of the fossils was the realization of more than twenty years of the philosopherstatesman's interest in the site and its natural treasures. Big Bone Lick: The Cradle of American Paleontology recounts the rich history of the fossil site that gave the world the first evidence of the extinction of several mammalian species, including the American mastodon. Big Bone Lick has played many roles: nutrient source, hallowed ground, salt mine, health spa, and a trove of archaeological riches and paleontological wonders. Natural historian Stanley Hedeen presents a comprehensive and accessible narrative of Big Bone Lick from its geological formation forward, explaining why the site attracted first animals, then Native peoples of the region, European explorers and scientists, and eventually American pioneers and presidents. Big Bone Lick is a history of both a place and a scientific discipline: it explores the infancy and adolescence of paleontology from its humble and sometimes humorous beginnings. Hedeen combines elements of history, geology, politics, and biology to make Big Bone Lick an entertaining story as well as a valuable historical resource.

MAYOR, A. 2005. Fossil Legends of the First Americans. xxxix + 446 pp. Princeton, Woodstock: Princeton University Press. Price £18.95 (hard covers). ISBN 0 691 11345 9

Like many other indigenous people, Native Americans for many centuries have observed fossils and mused about their origin and significance. Much of this fossil folklore has remained unwritten and the contemporary decline in storytelling means that some oral legends are in real danger of vanishing. Adrienne Mayor, an authority on natural history folklore and author of The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times (Princeton University Press), here rescues and collates a wealth of stories. Many were obtained during interviews with Native Americans as the author journeyed across the USA, visiting fossil sites, small museums and Indian Reservations. Meyer begins her book with an account of the first American fossils ever studied by European scientists. These mastodon bones were collected in 1739 from Big Bone Lick in …

Niche variability in late Holocene bison: a perspective from Big Bone Lick, KY

The Big Bone Lick (Boone County, Kentucky) bison fauna offer a glimpse into the population dynamics and behavioral characteristics of eastern Bison bison during the late Holocene. Examination of the Big Bone Lick dentitions suggests a single kill event that took place during winter or spring. Furthermore, osteometric comparisons of crania and metacarpals between the Big Bone Lick (BBL) bison and western Bison samples suggest that this species adapted to environmental conditions in the eastern US by adjusting developmental timing rather than through overt morphological change. Finally, isotopic (δ 13C, δ 18O) analyses of bison tooth enamel hydroxylapatite and a unique progression of tooth wear in older age groups indicate these bison were obligate browsers that exhibited substantial differences in inter-annual land-use patterns. The BBL bison assemblage represents a healthy, in situ bison population that successfully occupied a different ecological niche than bison on the Great Plains. Subsistence models that incorporate these animals should consider these important differences.

Bison Exploitation by Late Fort Ancient Peoples in the Central Ohio River Valley

Recent radiocarbon dating demonstrates that Bison bison was present in the central Ohio River Valley between AD 1450 and 1800. The association of this species with cultural material suggests that bison were exploited as a source of food and raw material by Fort Ancient peoples of the Madisonville phase. Bison sought access to the salt and sulphur spings at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, making this an important locale for bison exploitation.

Science, religion, and the fossils at Big Bone Lick

In 1739, Baron de Longueiul, a pioneer explorer of the Ohio River Valley, discovered a spectacular phenomenon: in an area surrounding a salt spring in northern Kentucky, the physical remains of extinct Pleistocene mammals protruded from the ground. The site soon became known as Big Bone Lick and attracted the attention of both American and European scientists. The idea of extinction posed a difficult problem for the scientific community during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. An examination of a fossilized shark discovered in Italy in 1666 led Niels Stensen and Robert Hooke to theorize that fossils were of organic origin. While the Stensen-Hooke position was logical from an anatomical point of view, it threatened to unravel the cosmology of both Christian and deist.

Paleontologic Investigations at Big Bone Lick State Park, Kentucky: A Preliminary Report

The Big Bone Lick area in Kentucky, the first widely known collecting locality for vertebrate fossils in North America, is being investigated for further faunal and geologic evidence. Mammal bones, ranging in age from Wisconsin (Tazewell?) to Recent, were recovered in 1962 from four different faunal zones in two terrace fills.

An Account of Two Heads Found in the Morass, Called the Big Bone Lick, and Presented to the Society, by Mr. Jefferson

An Account of Two Heads Found in the Morass, Called the Big Bone Lick, and Presented to the Society, by Mr. Jefferson