The forbidding Big Badlands in Western South Dakota contain the
richest fossil beds in the world. Even today these rocks continue
to yield new specimens brought to light by snowmelt and rain
washing away soft rock deposited on a floodplain long ago. The
quality and quantity of the fossils are superb: most of the species
to be found there are known from hundreds of specimens. The fossils
in the White River Group (and similar deposits in the American
west) preserve the entire late Eocene through the middle Oligocene,
roughly 35-30 million years ago and more than 30 million years
after non-avian dinosaurs became extinct. The fossils provide a
detailed record of a period of abrupt global cooling and what
happened to creatures who lived through it. The book provides a
comprehensive reference to the sediments and fossils of the Big
Badlands and will complement, enhance, and in some ways replace the
classic 1920 volume by Cleophas C. O'Harra. Because the book
focuses on a national treasure, it touches on National Park Service
management policies that help protect such significant fossils.
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