The earliest recorded geological work on the area covered by the Minilya four-mile sheet was that of Woodward (1907) who examined the country north of the Minilya River and noted the limestone on the west flank of the Giralia anticline. In 1909 A. Gibb Maitland described the Carboniferous and Permian succession in the area drained by the Gascoyne, Lyons, Minilya and Lyndon Rivers, but referred the whole sequence to the Carboniferous. Geologists of Oil Search Ltd., under D. Dale Condit, examined the Carnarvon Basin in 1932, 1934 and 1935. Raggatt (1936) described the stratigraphy of the Permian in some detail and subdivided the Cretaceous sequence. Raggatt and Fletcher (1937) examined the fauna of the Permian of the Carnarvon Basin. Teichert did detailed stratigraphic work in the Wandagee area from 1938 to 1940. Geologists of the Bureau of Mineral Resources mapped the Minilya Sheet from 1948 to 1951, using R.A.A.F. aerial photographs. The present sheet is entirely the result of the mapping of the Bureau geologists although much of the stratigraphic nomenclature is adapted from Raggatt's and Teichert's work.