Geology & Fossils
Nevada lies almost entirely within the Great Basin, which can be thought of as a vast depression between the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada filled with smaller mountain ranges. The Great Basin in turn lies within a geologic region called the Basin and Range.
Shallow seas covered this region during much of the Age of Dinosaurs. Thus, this is not the place to look for dinosaur fossils. However, fossils of ichthyosaurs have been found in the Great Basin, including Nevada and eastern California and Oregon.
But most Nevada fossils represent marine invertebrates that lived during the earlier Paleozoic Era. These include brachiopods, pelecypods (bivalves, such as clams), gastropods (snails), and cephalopods (animals with tentacles, like squids and octopuses).
Younger fossils representing the Age of Mammals are found here and there. For example, the remains of horses, camels, rhinoceroses, deer and antelope have been found in rocks above the ichthyosaur fossil site at Berlin.
The Ice Age
Ironically, America’s most arid state was one of the wettest states during the Pleistocene Epoch, or Ice Age. The great continental glaciers that ravaged so much of the Central Lowlands and New England never touched Nevada. However, the climate was much cooler and moister during the Ice Age, and enormous lakes covered much of the Great Basin.
One such lake was Lake Lahontana, which covered much of western Nevada and a portion of neighboring California. Its waters teemed with fishes, including the Lahontan cutthroat trout.
About 10,000 years ago, the last Ice Age glaciers melted away far to the northeast, and the climate became more arid. Lake Bonneville shrunk, leaving Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Lake Lahontan also began evaporating in the dry, desert air.
But the Lahontan cutthroat trout still survives in Lake Taho, Pyramid Lake and a few other location. It was adopted as Nevada’s state fish. Utah adopted another Ice Age survivor, the Bonneville cutthroat trout.
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