In Western South Dakota, Badlands National Park is one of the best places in the world to study fossil mammals. As far back as the 1840s, early settlers to the area were finding fossils eroding out of the buttes and sending them to universities on the East Coast for study. Paleontologists have been excavating and researching these ancient environments ever since, and for good reason.

Students will explore more than 75 million years of Earth's history recorded in painterly rock layers. They will come to learn the sections that preserve the epochs between 37 and 28 million years ago a time when this region was a hot, subtropical forest, and later, a savanna. Students will meet up with Ed Welsh paleontologist and park ranger at Badlands to learn more about the fantastic mammals that once roamed these ancient plains.

For more information, visit the Prehistoric Road Trip website.