United States or Madagascar ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Hooker, that there are Carboniferous plants which appear to be generically identical with some now living; that the cone of the Oolitic Araucaria is hardly distinguishable from that of an existing species; that a true Pinus appears in the Purbecks and a Juglans in the Chalk; while, from the Bagshot Sands, a Banksia, the wood of which is not distinguishable from that of species now living in Australia, had been obtained.
Further inland the country was crusted on the surface with an oolitic limestone, and for the most part covered by brush; a few open plains being interspersed here and there among the scrubs, as is generally the case in that description of country. The natives still appeared to be in our neighbourhood, but none had been near us since they first left on the 19th.
Pleurotomaria granulata, Sowerby. Ferruginous Oolite, Normandy. Pleurotomaria ornata, Sowerby Sp. Ammonites Humphresianus, Sowerby. Ammonites Braikenridgii, Sowerby. Oolite, Scarborough. Ostrea Marshii. One-half natural size. The extinct genus Pleurotomaria is also a form very common in this division as well as in the Oolitic system generally.
The upper surface of this country, like that of all we had passed through lately, consisted of a calcareous oolitic limestone, below which was a hard concrete substance of sand or of reddish soil, mixed with shells and pebbles; below this again, the principal portion of the cliff consisted of a very hard and coarse grey limestone, and under this a narrow belt of a whitish or cream-coloured substance, lying in horizontal strata; but what this was we could not yet determine, being unable to get down to it any where.
Godwin-Austen has shown, fragments and water- worn fossils of the oolitic rocks, speak plainly of the nature of the pre- existing formations, by the wearing down of which the Neocomian beds were formed. The land, consisting of such rocks, was doubtless submerged before the origin of the white chalk, a deposit which was formed in a more open sea, and in clearer waters. Perna Mulleti, Desh.
The fossil shells in the Cordillera of Central Chile, in the opinion of all the palaeontologists who have examined them, belong to the earlier stages of the cretaceous system; whilst in Northern Chile there is a most singular mixture of cretaceous and oolitic forms: from the geological relations, however, of these two districts, I cannot but think that they all belong to nearly the same epoch, which I have provisionally called cretaceo-oolitic.
The surface rock is invariably an oolitic limestone, mixed with an imperfect freestone, and in some places exhibits fossil banks, which bear evident marks of being of a very recent formation.
A drab colour like that of the skin of the common toad is given to them by the iron salts present in many oolitic rocks; those found in the wealden of the Isle of Wight are black. That the "toad-stones" mounted in ancient rings are really the teeth of a fish has been already recorded by the Rev. They undoubtedly are the palatal teeth of the fossil extinct ganoid fish Lepidotus.
The geological character of the country was exactly similar to that we had been in so long, entirely of fossil formation, with a calcareous oolitic limestone forming the upper crusts, and though this was occasionally concealed by sand on the surface, we always were stopped by it in digging; it was seemingly a very recent deposit, full of marine shells, in every stage of petrifaction.
Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod.
Word Of The Day