Not far from Virginia City, western Nevada (The Big Bonanza; The Comstock Lode) is a regional badlands area that yields a genuine bonanza of 13 to 12 million year-old fossil material: plants (leaves, cones, cone scales, needles, and twigs); insects (flies, gnats, midges and hymenoptera varieties--insects that usually have four wings); and frogs. Also found in the region is high grade, commercially exploitable diatomite, a rock type composed predominantly of diatoms, a microscopic single-celled photosynthesizing algae, used in numerous industrial applications.
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