Kala Chitta Range (in Punjabi and ur, ''Kālā Chiṭṭā'') is a mountain range in the

Attock District Attock District (Urdu and pnb, ) is a district in Pothohar Plateau of the Punjab Province of Pakistan. Its capital is Attock city. The district was created in April 1904 by the merging of tehsils of nearby districts. Its former name was ...

Punjab, Pakistan Punjab (; , ) is one of the four provinces of Pakistan. Located in central-eastern region of the country, Punjab is the second-largest province of Pakistan by land area and the largest province by population. It shares land borders with the ...

. Kala- Chitta are Punjabi words meaning Kala the Black and Chitta means the white. The range thrusts eastward across the

Potohar plateau The Pothohar Plateau ( ur, ) is a plateau in north-eastern Pakistan, located between Indus River and the Jhelum River, forming the northern part of Punjab. Geography Potohar Plateau is bounded on the east by the Jhelum River, on the west by t ...

towards

Rawalpindi Rawalpindi ( or ; Urdu, ) is a city in the Punjab province of Pakistan. It is the fourth largest city in Pakistan after Karachi, Lahore and Faisalabad, and third largest in Punjab after Lahore and Faisalabad. Rawalpindi is next to Pakistan ...

. Pakistan's Kuldana Formation is best known for its fossil mammals, including primitive cetaceans such as Pakicetus and their close relatives. Kuldana mammals have been considered in different studies as early Luthecians (early Middle Eocene), late Ypresians (late early Eocene) or, recently, they encompass much of Ypresians up to early Lutheian time (early part of the early Eocene to early Eocene medium).

Kuldana Formation

The Kuldana Formation is located in the Kata Chita hills and is a thin, 20-120 m thick tongue of low-lying continental red beds that lie within a much thicker sequence of foraminifera-rich marine formations. Shallow planktonic and

benthic The benthic zone is the ecological region at the lowest level of a body of water such as an ocean, lake, or stream, including the sediment surface and some sub-surface layers. The name comes from ancient Greek, βένθος (bénthos), meaning " ...

foraminifera Foraminifera (; Latin for "hole bearers"; informally called "forams") are single-celled organisms, members of a phylum or class of amoeboid protists characterized by streaming granular ectoplasm for catching food and other uses; and commonly ...

limit the age of the Kuldana Formation to the late early or early middle

Eocene The Eocene ( ) Epoch is a geological epoch that lasted from about 56 to 33.9 million years ago (mya). It is the second epoch of the Paleogene Period in the modern Cenozoic Era. The name ''Eocene'' comes from the Ancient Greek (''ēṓs'', ...

, and the current interpretation of global sea level stratigraphy favours the latter. The short duration of the low-water interval when Kuldana mammals are encountered means that differences between samples likely represent differences in local living environments, deposition sites, and sampling, rather than a substantial difference in age.

Kohat formation

The Kohat formation consists of calcareous shale and light grey limestone. It lies on top of the Kuldana formation and intermingles with the

Murree formation Murree (Punjabi, Urdu: مری) is a mountain resort city, located in the Galyat region of the Pir Panjal Range, within the Muree District of Punjab, Pakistan. It forms the outskirts of the Islamabad-Rawalpindi metropolitan area, and is about ...

of the

group. Formation in the middle Eocene.

Notes

{{PunjabGeography Attock District Mountain ranges of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Mountain ranges of Punjab (Pakistan)