Customer Reviews

Big Bone Lick: The Cradle of American Paleontology

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Stanley Hedeen does a nice job pulling together a wide variety of reference materials into a very readable account of the history of paleontological investigations at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky. I knew something about Thomas Jefferson's interest in the site, both before and after Lewis and Clarke's expedition to the American west, and how his paleontological interests partially motivated his desire for western exploration, but I was unfamiliar with the many others who visited the site and came away with magnificent fossils. The book highlights how this site helped raise the consciousness of people about distant times and the concept of species extinctions in general.

I'll be honest, it is not a book I'd recommend to just anyone who likes to read. The book is pretty dry, especially the first few chapters. Lots of straight-forward information organized into descriptive chapters. The chapters have titles such as "Relationship between surface bedrock and the Cincinnati Arch" and "Forty-inch-log femur collected at Big Bone Lick in 1739". I enjoy this sort of reading, but it isn't a page turner.

I think it picks up a bit in chapter 4 when the book really starts to get into the debates over the identification of mammoth and mastodon remains, and the philosophical and religious consequences of discovering that animals can and have gone extinct. (All the discoveries covered in this book pre-date the discovery of dinosaurs, though not by much.) You start to get a good idea of just how shattering these scientific discoveries were to the Western worldview of the day. And for those interested in figures in American history, this book features quite a few, including Thomas Jefferson, William Clark, and Daniel Boone. Also some important French Naturalists, especially Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon and Georges Cuvier.

The whole book is only 150 pages, and in my opinion well worth the read for those interested in the discovery of extinct megafauna, American history, or natural history during the Enlightenment.

Hedeen's "Big Bone Lick: The Cradle of American Paleontology" is a great review of the historical significance that Big Bone Lick played in American paleontology and science.

It was refreshing to read how our early American forefathers, including Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, were truly renaissance men who not only had interests in politics and world affairs, but also natural history and science issues (so different from many of our current politicians). I also enjoyed learning about how the Lick was an interface between our forefathers as well as some of the world's leading scientific minds.

The book was wonderfully quick and fascinating lead, but felt like it was lacking something.

Personally, I would have liked to learn more about the ecology of the extinct animals that were found at the site, or at least more in-depth information about the animals themselves. The content of the book really focused more on the major players who were involved in discoveries at the site, or naming and identifying the species found at the Lick, but spent little time talking about how those animals may have lived and died at the site (though did mention some speculations made by some of the people involved). Likewise, it would have been nice to learn more about the habitats and environments around the lick when these extinct animals were alive, and what may have actually caused their extinction (presumably climate change and the end of the ice age?).

Lastly, it would have been interesting if Hedeen could have expanded on the history of Native American groups at the Lick.

Overall, it's a great book and will be especially of interest to those who have visited the Lick, are familiar with the Ohio River Valley, or have an interest in early American paleontology.

Well-grounded in history, geology, and vertebrate paleontology, Hedeen for the most part ably deals with a historical problem compounded by a plethora of obscure and widely scattered references. In some respects, however, his study supplements rather than supplants the 1936 work of the same title by the indefatigable Willard Rouse Jillson. Hedeen's account is more readable and benefits from recent advances in our understanding of local geomorphology, paleoecology, and vertebrate taxonomy, and he incorporates much unpublished or "underpublished" recent research. A couple of well-documented early visitors (Capt. William Harrod, 1779, and Thomas Rodney, 1803) are overlooked for some reason. Curiously, the author includes without explanation a photograph of three Paleo-Indian points allegedly "collected" at Big Bone Lick and "now likely" housed at the Cincinnati Museum Center, while elsewhere he varously states 1) these fluted points were discovered in the lower level of the Big Bone deposits by William Clark in 1807 and 2) they were "most likely" discovered during Clark's expedition. The significance of the possible association of Paleo-Indian artifacts and megafauna at Big Bone Lick should certainly be acknowledged but not so ambiguously, and the considerable debate existing about the precise provenance and pedigree of these artifacts should also be acknowledged. Such strictures aside, this book provides ample context for the present Big Bone Lick State Park Museum, for which it appears to have been designed, and should remain a standard resource for many years.

At the entrance of Big Bone Lick State Park, Kentucky, one can reads
that this is the place where American vertebrate paleontology began.
This book offers a detailed historical overview of the area since the
18th century, and of the work done there, combining several scientific approaches, history, geology, biology and, of course, paleontology. It is more than a revision of Willard Rouse Jillson's 1936 classic book of the same title.