Notices of Big-hone Lick, 171 



tinued, "and on the third day came to a very fine entire (or 

 nearly so,) head of what I suppose to be the Siberian elephant, 

 four feet long, having all the teeth and one tusk in it. It is the 

 finest fossil I have ever seen, and the only one known except that 

 at St. Petersburgh. 



Megalonyx. Jefferson. Cuvier. 



ft was not until recently that any discovery of remains of this 

 animal was known to have been made, besides those dug out of 

 a cave in Virginia, about thirty-five years ago, and described by 

 Mr. Jefferson, in the American Philosophical Transactions.* From 

 the description given by Goforth, of the bones he found at Big- 

 hone Lick, afterwards carried to England, there was reason to 

 suspect, that among them there was some belonging to the 

 megalonyx. But Mr. Bullock states, that there were none among 

 those which came into his possession. The great claw mention- 

 ed in Ashe's account, he says, in a letter to Mr. Featherston- 

 haugh, was no more than a scapula of some animal, filed down 

 to this shape. Until my journey to Ohio, in 1828, I had no posi- 

 tive information of the megalonyx having been found, except in 

 the one instance, above referred to. 



Messrs. Drake and Mansfield, in their " Description of Cincin- 

 nati, in 1826," mention " bones of the megalonyx," preserved in 

 the Western museum, in that city. Some of these 1 saw there, 

 and was informed that they had been obtained by Mr. J. D. Clif- 

 ford, from the White cave, in Kentucky. Besides these, I found in 

 the same museum, a large humerus of megalonyx, discovered at 

 Big-bone Lick, during one of the searches made there, by order 

 of the proprietors. 



Mr. Cozzens and myself found also a metacarpal bone at the 

 same place, no doubt belonging to the megalonyx. This bone, 

 with all those in the Cincinnati collection, have been described 



* Although caverns are extremely numerous in the limestone region of the United 

 States, and have been often explored in search of nitrous earth, well authenticated in- 

 stances of fossil bones found in them, are very rare. The following paragraph is ex- 

 tracted from " A description of Big-hone Cave, in White county, Tennessee, hy D. 

 T. Maddox, Esq. Aug. 17, 1813," contained in an almanac published in the western 

 country. 



" My guide now informed me, that in this apartment had been found bones of a re- 

 markable size and figure. He said, they had dug up the talon of a lion, thirteen 

 inches long, the hoof of an elephant, the ribs of the mammoth, and the skull of a giant ; 

 but that they were all destroyed." 



The " talon of a lion," here mentioned,'may have been an ungueal phalanx, or even 

 a claw, of a megalonyx. 



