Big Bone Lick State Historic Site

About this park

Big Bone Lick State Historic Site preserves a site so significant to the founding of American paleontology that it is often called the "Birthplace of American Vertebrate Paleontology." Ancient salt springs here once attracted vast numbers of Ice Age megafauna, including mammoths and mastodons, whose bones accumulated in such quantity that early explorers and Native American traders described the area simply as the place where "the big bones are found," a name it has carried since at least the 1730s and 40s. Explorer Christopher Gist documented the site in his journals, naturalist John Bartram wrote about its fossils based on secondhand Native American accounts, and Daniel Boone himself reportedly examined the mammoth remains here between 1770 and 1775, after being released from Shawnee captivity. In 2024, the site was formally designated a National Historic Landmark, and a recent 288-acre expansion added habitat for rare bats and the federally endangered running buffalo clover. Today the park's museum and trails interpret both its Ice Age paleontology and its later human history as a 19th-century salt-making and health-spa destination, and the site hosts an annual Salt Festival each October drawing school groups and history enthusiasts. Camping, hiking, and picnicking round out a park where prehistoric science and frontier history genuinely overlap.