This place was strangely quiet, kind of like the way the way the air feels insulated at night after a heavy snow fall, like everything – voices, footsteps and cars – is dampened or muffled. The spires were very cool and vast. It was like a forest of stone instead of trees, of which there were none. We drove around the scenic byway and stopped at several places to look at the points of interest. They all looked the same, as you can tell by the photos. We did see lots and lots of prairie dogs, they were running across the grasslands, or just standing up watch us watch them. I did see a bunny while we were climbing among the spires and although there were lots of poisonous snake warning signs, we didn’t see any. I suppose that was a good thing. 
Pardon my Wiki here, but the information about the development of the area is pretty cool, so… learn something - Approximately 75 million years ago the Earth’s climate was warmer than it is now, and a shallow sea covered much of the region we know as the Great Plains. Stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada and from western Iowa to western Wyoming, this sea teemed with life. In today's Badlands the bottom of that sea appears as a grayish-black sedimentary rock called the Pierre (pronounced "peer") shale. This layer is an incredibly rich source of fossils, for creatures sank to the bottom of the sea when they died and over a long course of time became fossils. Within the park, the fossilized remains of a variety of animals have been found. Baculites, an extinct cephalopod, had a squid-like body with a long cylindrical shell tightly coiled at the one end. Inside the shell were individual chambers containing either gas or liquid for buoyancy control. Clams, crabs and snails in great numbers have also been found. Outside the park, the Pierre shale has yielded abundant remains of ancient fish; mosasaurs, giant marine lizards; pterosaurs, flying reptiles; Hesperonis, a diving bird something like a modern loon. Why have the rocks inside the park, which are so rich in invertebrate fossils, yielded so few marine creatures with backbones? Questions like these puzzle paleontologists and earth scientists who continue to search in hope of answering some of the questions about the park's and Earth's rich past.
Eons pass and Mellissa & Deanna show up... The pushing and shoving of continental plates leads to an active period of mountain building in the ancestral Rocky Mountains. This causes the land under the inland sea to rise, and in turn, the sea retreats and drains away. In time, the area that we now know as the Badlands is exposed to air and sunshine, yet it looks nothing like the landscape that we are familiar with today 
The climate is humid and warm, and rainfall is abundant. On the new land a subtropical forest develops, dense and dark. It flourishes for millions of years. Eventually, though, the climate slowly grows cooler and drier and the forest gives way, first to savanna, then later on to grasslands so much more like the present landscape. 
Today, after a heavy rainstorm in the Badlands, vivid red bands stand out against the buff tones of the buttes. Geologists and paleontologists tell us that these are fossilized soils, which make up much of the Badlands rocks. Fossil soils can tell us a great deal about the climate history of the Badlands; they also impart much of the colorful banding to Badlands rocks. Perhaps the best of all, the loose, crumbling rocks formed from these ancient soils hold one of the greatest collections of fossil mammals on Earth.
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