UNION, Ky. — Ken Tankersley walks to the boat dock he used for years. He tells me it was his favorite part of looking for fossils.
Tankersley and his students would put canoes in the creek and paddle upstream to Big Bone Lick. They were looking for bone beds and fossil deposits.
"Eventually, you’d find where they’re eroding out from,” Tankersley said.
For five decades, Tankersley studied Big Bone Lick. The former professor calls it the birthplace of American paleontology — and says the research done there has ties to Darwin’s theory of evolution.
But even though the state historic site is renowned in the paleontology world, Tankersley tells me the narrative about what happened to the massive mammals there during the last ice age isn’t true.
WATCH: We went to Big Bone Lick to see what he found
“There’s no such thing as a time machine. I can’t go back into the past,” Tankersley said. “So the closest I can come is through the fossils here in the Cincinnati area.”
That’s why Tankersley wrote his new book, “Fossils of Big Bone Lick.” To provide evidence that the incredibly large animals who lived there were hunted — by indigenous people and other animals.
And when the climate changed drastically, some of those animals evolved — and some couldn’t change fast enough. He tells me flooding buried the bones there.
“It’s not about the actual specimens,” Tankersley said. “It’s about what they can tell us about the past.”
Tankersley started his research at the Behringer-Crawford Museum in Covington. There, he inspected fossils that had never been examined before.
“And these fossils, they tell stories,” said Jason French, the curator of collections at the museum. “I will open up a box, and my jaw will drop.”
Kind of like what Tankersley remembers happening at Big Bone Lick as a kid, when his grandparents brought him there during active excavations. Someone handed him a mammoth tooth, and he knew exactly what he wanted to do the rest of his life.
“The key to understanding the present is in the past," Tankersley said. "And that’s what we found at Big Bone Lick.”
