Fossil Legends of the First Americans2007
by Adrienne Mayor
After the Abenaki discovery of 1739 and the American fossils' scientific debut in Paris in 1762, the mastodon, Columbian mammoth, and giant bison deposits at Big Bone Lick began to attract the interest of European and American scientists.
The burnt-red badlands of Montana's Hell Creek are a vast graveyard of the Cretaceous dinosaurs that lived 68 million years ago. Those hills were, much later, also home to the Sioux, the Crows, and the Blackfeet, the first people to encounter the dinosaur fossils exposed by the elements. What did Native Americans make of these stone skeletons, and how did they explain the teeth and claws of gargantuan animals no one had seen alive? Did they speculate about their deaths? Did they collect fossils?
Beginning in the East, with its Ice Age monsters, and...