Badlands National Park Trivia
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48 free Badlands National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Badlands National Park trivia quiz covers the sharply eroded buttes and pinnacles of southwestern South Dakota and the largest undisturbed mixed-grass prairie in the United States that surrounds them. Questions cover the geology (the Pierre Shale, the White River Group, the Yellow Mounds and the inch a year the rock loses to summer storms), the world-famous Oligocene fossil beds, and the wildlife, from the reintroduced bison herd to the black-footed ferret that was once declared extinct. The human story gets equal weight: the Lakota name that gives the park its own, the broken 1868 treaty, the Ghost Dance on Stronghold Table and the road to Wounded Knee, the Dust Bowl homesteaders, the World War II gunnery range that still litters the South Unit with ordnance, the Cold War missile silos next door, Dances with Wolves, and the drugstore in Wall that built an empire on free ice water. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy this one, try our Yellowstone and US National Parks quizzes next.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which landmark stands in the Black Hills of South Dakota, west of Badlands National Park?
Mount Rushmore
Mount Rushmore was carved between 1927 and 1941 by Gutzon Borglum and nearly 400 workers; Borglum died months before the end, leaving his son Lincoln to finish the job.
Q 02Besides its eroded buttes and pinnacles, Badlands National Park protects the largest undisturbed expanse of what in the US?
Mixed-grass prairie
Mixed-grass prairie grows here because rainfall sits between that of the wetter tallgrass prairie to the east and the dry shortgrass plains to the west, so its grasses range from ankle- to waist-high.
Q 03Which is the nearest major urban centre to Badlands National Park, and the second largest in South Dakota?
Rapid City
Rapid City, west of the park, was founded in 1876 during the Black Hills gold rush and grew as the eastern gateway to the hills.
Q 04French-Canadian trappers named the Badlands 'les mauvaises terres' because the land was bad for doing what?
Travelling across
Travelling across: the trappers' phrase meant bad lands to travel through, echoing the Lakota name mako sica, 'land bad', for the rugged terrain and lack of water.
Q 05Which president signed the 1929 law authorising Badlands National Monument on his final day in office?
Calvin Coolidge
Calvin Coolidge signed the act on 4 March 1929, his last day in office, but its conditions, including land purchases and a new highway through the Badlands, took a decade to meet, so the monument was proclaimed only in 1939.
Q 06Which president signed the 1978 law that made Badlands National Monument a national park?
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter signed the National Parks and Recreation Act on 10 November 1978, calling it the most significant conservation legislation of that Congress; one of its provisions renamed the Badlands monument a national park.
Q 07Fossils show that ancestors of which animal once roamed the Badlands alongside three-toed horses and early camels?
Rhinoceros
Rhinoceros relatives such as Subhyracodon lived here about 33 million years ago, when the Badlands were a warm, moist floodplain rather than dry prairie.
Q 08Who was Ben Reifel, the namesake of Badlands National Park's main visitor center?
The first Lakota elected to Congress
The first Lakota elected to Congress, Ben Reifel was born in a log cabin on the Rosebud Reservation, earned a Harvard doctorate and then served five terms as a South Dakota Republican from 1961.
Q 09The Ben Reifel Visitor Center was built in 1957–58 under which federal programme?
Mission 66
Mission 66 was a ten-year programme, launched in 1956, to modernise park facilities by the Service's 50th anniversary in 1966; the Badlands visitor center was one of its early products.
Q 10Which Oscar-winning Western was partly filmed in Badlands National Park?
Dances with Wolves
Dances with Wolves, Kevin Costner's epic, won seven Oscars; the bison hunt was shot at the Triple U buffalo ranch near Fort Pierre, while the park supplied Badlands scenery.
Q 11Where was the 1868 treaty promising the Badlands would forever belong to the Sioux signed?
Fort Laramie
Fort Laramie, in present-day Wyoming, hosted the 1868 treaty that set aside the Great Sioux Reservation, including the Black Hills; Congress carved up that reservation in 1889.
Q 12One of the last Ghost Dances of 1890 was held on which flat-topped mesa in the park's South Unit?
Stronghold Table
Stronghold Table hosted one of the last Ghost Dances late in 1890; as winter closed in, the dancers came down from the mesa and returned to the agency.
Q 13The Ghost Dance movement of 1890 followed the vision of which Paiute prophet?
Wovoka
Q 21The colourful band in the Badlands called the Yellow Mounds is what, geologically?
An ancient weathered soil
An ancient weathered soil: the Yellow Mounds are a paleosol, a fossil soil that formed as the dark shale beneath weathered at the surface before rivers buried it under fresh sediment.
Q 22Roughly how much do the bare slopes of the Badlands erode each year?
About an inch
About an inch a year, a rapid rate for rock: the granite of the nearby Black Hills loses an inch in about 10,000 years, and at this pace the Badlands are expected to erode away within 500,000 years.
Q 23Ash in the Badlands' rock layers came from eruptions in which region of the American West?
Wovoka, also known as Jack Wilson, said a vision in 1889 showed him that the dead would return and the whites disappear if his people danced and lived in peace.
Q 14Ghost Dance followers wore special shirts believed to have what power?
To stop bullets
To stop bullets: the ghost shirts appeared among the Lakota in 1890, in a ceremony whose Paiute founder had preached living in peace with the whites.
Q 15Chief Spotted Elk's band crossed the Badlands Wall in December 1890 on the way to which tragedy?
Wounded Knee Massacre
Wounded Knee Massacre: on 29 December 1890 the 7th Cavalry opened fire while disarming Spotted Elk's band, killing more than 250 Lakota, many of them women and children; 25 soldiers also died.
Q 16Which people, now part of North Dakota's Three Affiliated Tribes, hunted the Badlands before the Lakota?
Arikara
The Arikara, a Caddoan-speaking farming people, camped in the Badlands before the Lakota arrived in the 18th century; charcoal from their fires and bison-butchering tools erode out of the stream banks.
Q 17The Badlands hold the richest known mammal fossil beds from which geological age, about 33 million years ago?
Oligocene
Oligocene beds are some 30 million years too young for dinosaurs: their fossils are mammals such as three-toed horses, which roamed an open savanna where the bare buttes now stand.
Q 18The first Badlands fossil known to science, a jaw collected by a fur trader, was described by a physician in which city?
St. Louis
St. Louis physician Hiram Prout took the jaw for a giant Palaeotherium, an extinct European relative of the horse; later study showed it came from a titanothere, one of the 'thunder beasts' of Lakota tradition.
Q 19Which Yale fossil hunter won access to the Dakota badlands in 1874 by agreeing to carry Red Cloud's complaints to Washington?
O. C. Marsh
O. C. Marsh kept his word, taking samples of the poor rations issued at Red Cloud's agency back east as proof of fraud; the two became friends, and Red Cloud later visited him at Yale.
Q 20The oldest rock in Badlands National Park, the Pierre Shale, was laid down 75 million years ago beneath what?
An inland sea
An inland sea, the shallow Western Interior Seaway, left the Pierre Shale with fossils of ammonites and mosasaurs before draining away as the Rockies rose late in the Cretaceous.
The Great Basin
The Great Basin of Nevada and Utah sent ash that washed onto the floodplains with sediment from the Black Hills; it now shows as the white bands in the Badlands' striped cliffs.
Q 24Which endangered mammal, once written off as extinct, has been reintroduced to the Badlands Wilderness?
Black-footed ferret
Black-footed ferret: the species was thought extinct until 1981, when a Wyoming ranch dog named Shep killed one and carried it home; every ferret alive today descends from the colony found there.
Q 25Which burrowing animals make up about 90% of the diet of Badlands National Park's most endangered predator?
Prairie dogs
Prairie dogs are both larder and landlord: the predator hunts them underground and raises its young in their burrows, so an outbreak of plague in a prairie dog town can wipe out both.
Q 26The Badlands bison herd began in 1963 with animals shipped from which other national park with badlands of its own?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota supplied the founding herd in 1963; it has grown to about 1,200, and each autumn's roundup sends surplus bison to tribal herds.
Q 27Which bird, found in the grasslands of Badlands National Park, is South Dakota's official state bird?
Ring-necked pheasant
Ring-necked pheasant: South Dakota's state bird since 1943 is not a native at all but an Asian game bird introduced for hunters, and it now lives in the park's grasslands.
Q 28Which grass, the most common in Badlands National Park, is also South Dakota's official state grass?
Western wheatgrass
Western wheatgrass spreads by creeping underground stems that bind the prairie soil into a tough mat; South Dakota named it state grass in 1970, and North Dakota chose it too.
Q 29What rare fossil did a seven-year-old visitor spot near the Badlands visitor center in 2010?
A saber-toothed cat
A saber-toothed cat: Kylie Ferguson reported the skull to rangers instead of digging it out, and it proved to be a rare nimravid, a cat-like hunter that walked flat-footed like a bear.
Q 30What may visitors do almost anywhere in the Badlands Wilderness?
Camp overnight
Camp overnight: backpackers may pitch a tent almost anywhere in the 64,000-acre wilderness, but fires, pets and bicycles are all banned, and every fossil must stay where it lies.