The Neuquén Basin in northern Patagonia, Argentina, has long
been valued for its assorted treasures. The area has been tapped
for its oil and gas reserves for years, but paleontologists have
scoured the area looking for something else: fossils that would
provide a window to this area’s past. In November 2005, a
research team described a prehistoric creature whose fossil
remains they found in the Basin. Unlike anything alive today,
the 135 million-year-old, 13-foot-long crocodile had the head of
a meat-eating dinosaur and the tail of a fish. Landsat 7’s
Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) sensor captured this image
of the Neuquén Basin on October 27, 2000. The Neuquén Basin is
now a semiarid environment, evidenced by its earth tones ranging
from beige to rust to deep brown. In the center right portion of
the image, an array of tiny beige dots shows evidence of human
activity—exploration for oil and gas in the form of wells. The
rocks themselves, however, document the vastly different
environment that existed