Update
Working Together for the Future of Parks
Badlands National Park
The Bad Lands grade all the way from those that are almost rolling in character to those that are so fantastically broken in form and so bizarre in color as to seem hardly properly to belong to this earth.
Nature’s Surreal Masterpiece
Test your assumptions—and see all of nature’s possibilities at the Badlands—one of the most unique places
in America. Mystical, dramatic pinnacles rise over the prairie, leaving the viewer unsure if she’s even still on
Earth.
The Badlands provide some of the most mysterious sights to see in the national park system, from fossil
beds to spired rocks formations.
Located on the edge of our country’s Great Plains in southwestern South Dakota, Badlands National Park consists of 244,000 acres of sharply eroded buttes, pinnacles and spires blended with the largest, protected mixed-grass prairie in the United States.
Badlands National Park contains one of the world’s richest fossil beds, permitting scientists to study the evolution of mammal species such as the horse, rhino and saber-toothed cat. From tiny shrews to 2,000-pound bison, the Badlands is home to many species of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds and butterflies.