Dem Bones

     How it makes the ganglia twitch to go from Creation Museum immersion to a place like Big Bone Lick State Park, Union, KY, where all the time periods are zillions of years. It's called the birthplace of vertebrate paleontology in the US because many thousands of large land creatures' bones have been found there, from the 1700s to the present. Meriwether Lewis stopped by to load up some bones for Thomas Jefferson. The water there is very salty. That's where the "lick" in the name comes from. Mammoths and mastodons and giant sloths came along to get their salt and sank in the "jelly ground," as the colonists called it. That I can buy. Sounds like the LaBrea tar pits. 
     Things get goofy when the signs say there is sedimentary rock under the bedrock. I wonder how that managed to slip in over bazillions of years. It sounds like catastrophic upheaval to me. And the salt comes from a layer of minerals way deep under it all. Within shouting distance of the mammalian bone pile is a hillside full of fossilized trilobites and other sea creatures. From a sea. That used to cover the area. Aren't there juxtapositions like this all over the world? Seashells on mountaintops? That sea sure gets around. 
     Just for fun, this is where in 1750 one Mary Ingles escaped Shawnee captors who brought her and other slaves to harvest salt. She and one other slipped away and started walking. Forty days later, an acquaintance spotted Mary and took her home. No sign of the other escapee. I couldn't help wondering how well fed Mary was.