Thomas Jefferson and Big Bone Lick

To understand President Thomas Jefferson's interest in Big Bone Lick, you must first understand the history leading up to and beyond Jefferson's quest for fossils from here...

The earliest European reports of the mastodon followed the 1705 discovery of a fist-sized tooth and bone fragments near the village of Claverack in the Hudson River valley of Colonial New York. Accounts by two Puritan clergymen, Edward Taylor and Cotton Mather, popularized the discovery and attributed the remains to a race of giants destroyed during the Biblical Flood.

Giants were popular in the folklore of many cultures. Indeed, Edward Taylor invoked Native American legends of human giants in his account of the "Giant of Claverack." They were also prominent in the two pillars of Western Civilization: the Classics of Ancient Greece and Rome, and the teachings of the Church. For instance, many ancient Romans and Hellenistic Greeks believed that gigantic Cyclops were the first inhabitants of Sicily. Accounts of giants can also be found in the works of Virgil, Pliny and Homer. Christian references to giants extended from its early years to well into the 18th century.

Enter the French

During the first half of the 1700s, most of North America was claimed by three European superpowers. Spain occupied Mexico and Florida while the Britain domains included the thirteen Atlantic colonies and the Hudson Bay Region. The French controlled Quebec and the Great Lakes and claimed the vast interior drainages of the Missouri, Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.

In 1739, Baron Charles de Lougueuil commanded French troops and their Native American allies in a campaign against the Chickasaw in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Early in the campaign Lougueuil's party stopped by a marsh near the Ohio River that was probably the site later known as Big Bone Lick. Several fossils were collected at the site, including a tusk, a femur (upper leg bone) and at least three molar teeth. Following the completion of the campaign in 1740, Lougueuil sent these fossils to the Cabinet du Roi (Royal Cabinet of Curiosities) in Paris.

The Ohio specimens at the Cabinet du Roi laid in relative obscurity until Jean-Etienne Geuttard published an article in 1756 on North American geology. In it he presented an illustration of one of the molars and puzzled over its identity: "From what animal is this?"

The first systematic examination of Lougueuil's fossils was published in 1762 by Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton. Anatomical comparisons of the femur (upper rear leg bone) with that of an elephant and that of the Siberian mammoth led Daubenton to conclude that, although they differed in size, the three femurs were nearly identical in form. The reasonable conclusion, therefore, was that these three animals were all elephants. (At the time, Daubenton and most other naturalists  belived that all living elephants belonged to just one species. Many also suspected that the Siberian Mammoth was an elephant.

Examination of the tusk confirmed Daubenton's identification of the Ohio animal as an elephant. The teeth, however, were another matter.

The massive molars of elephants (and mammoths) have flat grinding surfaces with numerous low ridges and relatively little enamel. In contrast, the molars of the "animal del Ohio" had multiple pairs of pronounced cone-shaped knobs covered with dense enamel. It was clear that these molars could not belong to an elephant. Instead, Daubenton attributed the molars to a giant form of hippopotamus, an animal with somewhat similar teeth. The teeth and bones were reportedly collected together by Native Americans in Lougueuil's party, but Daubenton dismissed these accounts by "ignorant savages". To him, these fossils clearly belonged to two different species.

The identification of these Ohio fossils satisfied Daubenton and his superior, George Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon. However, the presence of presumably tropical elephants and hippopotami so far north was puzzling. Similarly, the remains of the Siberian mammoth, which was also considered an elephant, were found even further north.

The typical explanation for this abnormal distribution was that their remains were transported north during the massive biblical flood. For Buffon, this explanation was insufficient. Instead, he concluded that if elephants were once found so far north, then these northern lands must have once been tropical. The existence of northern elephants ultimately led Buffon to develop a remarkable "Theory of the Earth", the details of which were published in his Epoques de la Nature in 1778.