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During late Pleistocene time an integrated river system occupied several of the desert basins in eastern California and southwestern Nevada, with Death Valley as the sump. A study of the Recent and fossil fishes of the region supports the physiographic evidence for the existence of this drainage and presents zoögeographic data which strongly suggest connections between this system and the Lahontan basin to the north, as well as with the Colorado River basin to the south and east. Both the physiographic and the fish evidence harmonize. Detailed maps of the Pleistocene and Recent hydrography of the southern Great Basin are presented, and two new lakes are mapped and named.
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Robert R. Miller (1946) studied this question.
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