The Badlands--sometimes referred to as "The Land God Forgot"--boast herds of roaming buffalo, Rocky Mountain sheep, pronghorns and prairie dog colonies. The Badlands teem with life, and its desolate beauty draws hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world each year.
Sediment deposited on the Great Plains for tens of millions of years began to erode about one-half million years ago, carving the rugged, lunar-like landscape of the Badlands. Knobs, pinnacles, immense buttes and deep gorges of sharply eroded, sunset-colored sedimentary rock layers make up the Badlands. Vast areas of mixed grass and covered prairie abut the rocky formations.
According to the South Dakota Badlands and Black Hills website, 50 percent of Badlands National Park is "co-managed with the Oglala Lakota Nation, the second largest American Indian Reservation in the United States."
The South Unit contains many sacred sites of the Oglala Lakota that may not be disturbed by visitors. The Oglala called the inhospitable but awe-inspiring formations the "mako sica,” which means "land bad."
According to the State Parks website, Badlands National Park contains the world's richest Oligocene epoch fossil beds of animals, dating back some 35 million years. An intended four-day excavation project in 1993 lasted 15 years.
The excavation, referred to as the Big Pig Dig, turned up many animal fossil remains, including those of a hornless rhinoceros called a Subhyracodon that excavators first thought was an ancient ancestor of the modern pig, hence the dig's nickname.
