North Dakota lies in the Prairie Plains and Great Plains physiographic provinces.
The degree of accuracy in such anatomical and physiographic restorations from relatively imperfect evidence will always represent the state of the science and the degree of its approach toward being exact or complete.
The state is divided into two distinct physiographic provinces; the Alleghany Plateau on the west, comprising perhaps two-thirds of the area of the state, and forming a part of the great Appalachian Plateau Province which extends from New York to Alabama; and the Newer Appalachians or Great Valley Region on the east, being a part of the large province of the same name which extends from Canada to Central Alabama.
All the fossil plants and animals of every kind are brought from this continent into a great museum; the latitude, longitude and relative elevation of each specimen are precisely recorded; a corps of investigators, having the most exact and thorough training in zoology and botany, and gifted with imagination, will soon begin to restore the geographic and physiographic outlines of the continent, its fresh, brackish and salt-water confines, its seas, rivers and lakes, its forests, uplands, plains, meadows and swamps, also to a certain extent the cosmic relations of this continent, the amount and duration of its sunshine, as well as something of the chemical constitution of its atmosphere and the waters of its rivers and seas; they will trace the progressive changes which took place in the outlines of the continent and its surrounding oceans, following the invasion§ of the land by the sea and the re-emergence of the land and retreatal of the seashore; they will outline the shoals and deeps of its border seas, and trace the barriers which prevented intermingling of the inhabitants of the various provinces of the continent and the surrounding seas.
The analysis of continental faunas into those inhabiting rivers, lowlands, forests, plains or uplands, affords a key to physiographic conditions all through the Tertiary.