Ischigualasto, the Valley of the Moon

Six hundred square kilometres of grey and white badlands in San Juan Province, named in a language nobody speaks any more, with one reading of the word being the place where the moon alights. What is in the rock is the reason people come from everywhere. The Ischigualasto Formation covers the Late Triassic from 231.4 to 225.9 million years ago in an unbroken sequence, which almost nowhere else does, and it holds some of the oldest dinosaur remains known, described as the foremost in the world for quality, number and importance. Eoraptor lunensis and Herrerasaurus both came out of here, and both major dinosaur lineages are already present in these beds, which is how you know the split happened earlier still. Only about 11 percent of the tetrapod fossils are dinosaurs at all; the rest are the rhynchosaurs and cynodonts they were living among and had not yet replaced. UNESCO listed it with neighbouring Talampaya in 2000. Park established 3 November 1971.