It's obvious there wasn't always a valley in the area that encompasses the Panamint and Funeral mountains. The oldest rocks in Death Valley have been dated to about 1.7 billion years old but they are so severely damaged it is hard to tell the history of the land that far back. Rocks dating from 500 million years ago paint a clear picture of what used to inhabit the area better. The limestones and sandstones found in the Funeral and Panamint Mountains indicate that this area was the site of a warm, shallow sea throughout most of the Paleozoic Era (542 - 251 million years ago). Can the rocks from 500 million years ago help us tell the story of a billion years prior?
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