Big Bone Lick State Park 1960 Kids T-Shirt

Just south of the Kentucky/Ohio border, in the North River Region of Kentucky, is a Big Bone Lick State Park. The inappropriate sounding name comes from a natural 'lick,' which is a place with salt in the ground where animals converge to literally lick the salt needed for their diets. The area has been being frequented by animals since at least the Pleistocene era, so mastodons and other prehistoric beasts came here to get salt and, instead, met their end. The soil of the lick is not just salty, but swampy, much like the La Brea Tar Pits of Southern California, except with mud instead of tar. European explorers stumbling upon the area in the mid 1700s were stunned by the massive bones they found protruding from the ground.