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Updated: June 13, 2025
Upper Lias, argillaceous, with Ammonites striatulus. FOREIGN. Keuper beds of Germany. Cassian or Hallstadt beds, with rich marine fauna. BRITISH. Wanting. FOREIGN. Muschelkalk of Germany. BRITISH. Bunter or Lower New Red sandstone of Lancashire and Cheshire. FOREIGN. Bunter-sandstein of Germany. BRITISH. Upper Permian of St. Bees' Head, Cumberland. FOREIGN. Dark-coloured shales of Thuringia.
Ceratites nodosus, Schloth. Muschelkalk, Germany. The next member of the Trias in Germany, the Muschelkalk, which underlies the Keuper before described, consists chiefly of a compact greyish limestone, but includes beds of dolomite in many places, together with gypsum and rock-salt. This limestone, a formation wholly unrepresented in England, abounds in fossil shells, as the name implies.
Between the third and fourth there is, in Germany, another group, called the Muschelkalk, a word expressing a limestone full of shells. The first group, containing the conglomerates already adverted to, seems to have been produced during the time of disturbance which occurred so generally after the carbonigenous era.
The specimens found in the muschelkalk are allied to the crocodile and lizard tribes of the present day, but in the latter instance are upon a scale of magnitude as much superior to present forms as the lepidodendron of the coal era was superior to the dwarf club-mosses of our time. These saurians also combine some peculiarities of structure of a most extraordinary character.
The co-ordinate layers of gem-salt, muriatiferous clay and gypsum present the same difficulties in both hemispheres; these masses, the forms of which are very irregular, everywhere exhibit traces of great commotions. Sometimes gem-salt appears to oscillate between variegated sandstone and muschelkalk. I made two excursions on the peninsula of Araya.
Sir Charles Lyell points out that "the hiatus which exists in Great Britain between the fossils of the Lias and those of the Magnesian Limestone, is supplied in Germany by the rich fauna and flora of the Muschelkalk, Keuper, and Bunter Sandstein, which we know to be of a date precisely intermediate."
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