Cañadón Asfalto Basin

The Cañadón Asfalto Basin (Spanish: Cuenca de Cañadón Asfalto) is an irregularly shaped sedimentary basin located in north-central Patagonia, Argentina. The basin stretches from and partly covers the North Patagonian Massif in the north, a high forming the boundary of the basin with the Neuquén Basin in the northwest, to the Cotricó High in the south, separating the basin from the Golfo San Jorge Basin. It is located in the southern part of Río Negro Province and northern part of Chubut Province. The eastern boundary of the basin is the North Patagonian Massif separating it from the offshore Valdés Basin and it is bound in the west by the Patagonian Andes, separating it from the small Ñirihuau Basin.

The basin started forming in the Early Jurassic, with the break-up of Pangea and the creation of the South Atlantic, when extensional tectonics, including rifting, formed several basins in eastern South America and southwestern Africa. The accommodation space in the Cañadón Asfalto Basin was filled by volcanic, fluvial and lacustrine deposits in various geologic formations, separated by unconformities related to transtensional and transpressional tectonic forces. The Cenozoic evolution of the basin is mainly influenced by the Andean orogeny, producing folding and faulting in the basin.

The basin is of paleontological significance as it hosts several fossiliferous stratigraphic units providing many fossils of dinosaurs, turtles, mammals, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, crocodylomorphs, fish, amphibians and flora in the Mesozoic and mammals, amphibians, fish and flora in the Cenozoic. The Collón Curá Formation, that is also present in the southern Neuquén Basin, is the defining formation for the Colloncuran, used within the SALMA classification, the geochronology for the Cenozoic used in South America.