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Badlands National Park in southwestern South Dakota is two things at once: a landscape of spires and gullies still being carved by rain, and the world's richest collection of Oligocene vertebrate fossils. The same erosion that makes the scenery keeps uncovering the bones.
The Yellow Mounds, ancient soils exposed in Badlands. NPS photo by Dave Krueger
The park in numbers
| Size | 242,756 acres |
| Time in the rocks | about 75 million years — sea floor, shoreline and dry land are all there |
| Fossil species | more than 250 vertebrates, herbivores and carnivores |
| Became a national monument | 1939, largely for its fossils |
| Enlarged | 1976 |
| Became a national park | 1978 |
| Province | the Great Plains |
Where "badlands" comes from
The White River Badlands are where badland topography was first recognized and described — the type locality that every other intricately eroded landscape of the kind is compared with. Sparse plants, soft rock and hard rain have carved them into spires, pinnacles, hoodoos, buttes and mesas. Weathering, slumping and erosion made them, and are still making them, exposing new fossils as they go.
It looked nothing like this in the Oligocene, between about 34 and 23 million years ago, when forests and savannas covered the region and rivers spread floodplains across it.
The fossils
The fossil beds are in the White River Group, of Eocene and Oligocene age, and above all in its Oligocene Brule Formation. They let scientists trace how whole families of mammals evolved, and how their habitat changed.
- Every size of animal: from rodents to the elephant-sized titanotheres.
- Small insect-eaters: golden moles, hedgehogs and shrews.
- More than 50 herbivore and 14 carnivore species found so far.
- Nearly twice as many mammal families as live in all of North America today.
- An early camel, Poebrotherium wilsoni, whose fossils have told researchers about its diet and about the Oligocene climate.
All fossils on park land are protected by the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act of 2009: look, photograph, and leave them where they are.
Maps and reports
The NPS Geologic Resources Inventory has produced a scoping summary, a digital geologic map (GIS files; newer products add Google Earth views), a report on the park's setting, features, management issues and history, and a poster. A Soil Resources Inventory is complete as well. Both are in the NPS DataStore — saved searches 2713 (geology) and 2780 (soils).
The Geologic Resources Inventory report for Badlands. NPS
The park's digital geologic map. NPS
More
Sources
Written from "NPS Geodiversity Atlas—Badlands National Park, South Dakota," Geologic Resources Division, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. It cites Weedon (1990), Kiver and Harris (1999), and Wall and Hauptman (2001).
In these collectionsBadlands National Park
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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