The Bisti/De-Na-Zin Badlands are a 45,000 acre wilderness in San Juan County, New Mexico, managed by the Bureau of Land Management since 1984 and expanded by roughly 2,250 acres in 2019. The exposed rock spans four formations from the end of the Cretaceous into the early Paleogene, the Fruitland's gray shales and coal beds, the Kirtland's greenish shales and siltstones, and the Ojo Alamo's purple mudstone capped by massive brown sandstone cliffs. The dramatic badlands topography, including hoodoos where a cap of resistant rock has protected a pinnacle of softer rock beneath it, is geologically young, having been carved by erosion only within roughly the last three to six thousand years. The same rock layers preserve around two hundred species of plant and animal fossils from the late Cretaceous and early Paleocene, making the badlands as important to paleontology as they are striking to look at.
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