SdBadlands

South Dakota

Badlands

You wouldn't know it by the photos at right, but the South Dakota Badlands can be a pretty desolate place. The last few years have seen more rain than usual. That is why you see so much green. The rain is good for fossil hunting, because it washes out more fossils. It is bad because if they are not collected, they are now exposed and will start to break down and turned to gravel. That process can happen fairly fast, in as little as one year.

It is illegal to collect vertebrate fossils on public land. The land that we collected on is private land, with permission of the owner. It would do no good to try to dig for fossils since you could dig all day and never find anything. Almost all fossil that can be found will be found laying on top of the ground or at least partially exposed. You basically have to wait for the rain and other weather to do its work first. Then carefully search for anything that may have been exposed on the surface or washed out of the hillsides. As you can see by some of the pictures, you have to look very carefully or you will miss the small fossils (like teeth-center of photo at far right, with bone fragments on either side). There are many turtles which were exposed, but not collected in time, and have decayed to the point that they can no longer be repaired. We use the shell from these turtles in our fossil sets. We hope to add bone fragments to our larger sets in the future.

Even though the Badlands have had higher than normal rainfall the last few years, temperatures can still reach 125 degrees on a very hot day. So, bringing plenty of water and your own shade is necessary.

The area which we collected on is part of an old bombing range. Shell casings, slugs, and shrapnel can still be found laying on the ground. Try to imagine how many fossils the government must have destroyed while using this area to test their weapons. And now the public areas are closed off to collecting of vertebrate fossils. The fossils will now be reduced to gravel on an annual basis. Obviously they don't care about saving our heritage, they just don't want anyone to profit from it (without being able to tax them).

To see some of the other places we have been or other things that we have done, please view other pages in this web site. Also enjoy the products and information on this web site. New additions, and updates, are made to the site monthly.

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