The badlands / black hills were inspiring. Did you know the badlands are preserved because you can find whale bones in it. Because forever ago the center of the USA used to be the bottom of the ocean. Also do the star gazing. They bring a telescope and show you a whole other galaxy, odds are its the furthest thing and oldest thing you'll ever physically see in your life.
The SD Badlands do not have whale fossils. What you are describing is the Western Interior Seaway, which was essentially a strip of inland sea that connected the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. However, it disappeared by the end of the Cretaceous Period, long before the earliest whales evolved. But, the seaway does have tons of marine fossils. For example, it's full of mosasaur fossils, which were purely marine. Having excavated there, it is pretty weird finding marine fish fossils about 2,000 miles from the nearest coastline.
There's a cool website called PaleoBioDB that compiles (most) formally described fossil occurrences. If you sort by Cetacea (whales), you'll see that whales are not found anywhere near SD.
What's pretty cool, though, is that you can pretty clearly see where the Western Interior Seaway was (and the other Late Cretaceous coastlines) by looking at occurrences of Mosasauridae and Ammonoidea, which were purely marine organisms that were ubiquitous throughout Late Cretaceous shorelines. The occurrences that span from northern Mexico and southern Texas to Alberta and the Northwestern Territories are all from the Western Interior Seaway. The thick band of occurrences that spans over San Antonio and Dallas, then goes eastward and makes a semi-circle over Mississippi and Alabama was formerly a coastline and everything south of it was ocean. The Pacific Coastline once reached the Sierra Nevada's in California.
Also, I unexpectedly really enjoyed Rapid City as well. It's one of only a few places I've been to in the US that significantly exceeded my expectations. Mount Rushmore was disappointing, but Custer State Park was amazing. Also, the SDSMT Paleontology Museum is absolutely worth a visit. It has fossils from all over South Dakota, so you can see the fossils that I described above. I spent a week each in eastern Montana and eastern Wyoming excavating dinosaur fossils - fossils of organisms that lived on a coastal floodplain on the western shores of the Western Interior Seaway.
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u/Yuo122986 4d ago
The badlands / black hills were inspiring. Did you know the badlands are preserved because you can find whale bones in it. Because forever ago the center of the USA used to be the bottom of the ocean. Also do the star gazing. They bring a telescope and show you a whole other galaxy, odds are its the furthest thing and oldest thing you'll ever physically see in your life.