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| The Bighorn Basin is a large intermontane basin in the Rocky Mountain foreland (Blackstone, 1986). The Bighorn Basin includes parts of Big Horn, Park, Washakie, and Hot Springs Counties. Like the other major sedimentary basins of Wyoming, such as the Shirley Basin, the Laramie Basin, and the Powder River Basin, the Big Horn Basin is bound by significant mountain uplifts: the Beartooth Mountains on the Northwest, the Pryor Mountains to the North, the Bighorn Mountains on the East, and the Owl Creek Mountains on the South (Heasler and Hinckley, 1985). The basin is composed of approximately 10,000 square miles of dominantly Cretaceous rocks in addition to localized outcrops of Triassic, Jurassic, and Tertiary stratigraphy. | Prior to the Laramide orogenic event, the Bighorn Basin was not a sedimentary or structural basin. Rather, the Paleozoic and Mesozoic formations were deposited in a setting of a large platform area that saw repeated transgressions and regressions of the epicontinental seas. Of interest to the study of the fossil material on the Warm Springs Ranch are Mesozoic strata, in particular, the formations deposited from the Triassic through the Cretaceous. |
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