The Price River Formation is a

geologic formation A geological formation, or simply formation, is a body of rock having a consistent set of physical characteristics ( lithology) that distinguishes it from adjacent bodies of rock, and which occupies a particular position in the layers of rock exp ...

Utah Utah is a landlocked state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It is one of the Four Corners states, sharing a border with Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. It also borders Wyoming to the northea ...

. It preserves

fossils A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved ...

dating back to the

Cretaceous The Cretaceous ( ) is a geological period that lasted from about 143.1 to 66 mya (unit), million years ago (Mya). It is the third and final period of the Mesozoic Era (geology), Era, as well as the longest. At around 77.1 million years, it is the ...

period Period may refer to: Common uses * Period (punctuation) * Era, a length or span of time *Menstruation, commonly referred to as a "period" Arts, entertainment, and media * Period (music), a concept in musical composition * Periodic sentence (o ...

. The Price River Formation is approximately thick at its type locality ( Price River Canyon) and consists of cliff-forming sandstone and siltstone visible in the

Book Cliffs The Book Cliffs are a series of desert mountains and cliffs in western Colorado and eastern Utah in the Western United States. They are so named because the cliffs of Cretaceous sandstone capping many of the south-facing buttes appear simila ...

Description

Irregularly bedded light-gray to gray, and grayish-brown to dark-gray beds of sheet sandstone, plus some beds of conglomerate and conglomeratic sandstone; sparse mudstone beds as well. The crossbedded sandstones are generally thin bedded to massive, and commonly thick bedded. Beds alternate irregularly to form steep, steplike slopes. Ranges in thickness from 9 to 75 m (30–250 ft). Fluvial in origin. This unit is equivalent, in part, to the Tuscher and Farrer Formations of the eastern Book Cliffs. Fossil pollen (palynomorphs) indicate a late Campanian (Late Cretaceous) age .Fouch, T.D., Lawton, T.F., Nichols, D.J., Cashion, W.B., and Cobban, W.A., 1983, Patterns and timing of synorogenic sedimentation in Upper Cretaceous rocks of central and northeast Utah, IN Reynolds, M.W., and Dolly, E.D., eds., Mesozoic paleogeography of the west-central United States: Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists, Rocky Mountain Section, Rocky Mountain Paleogeography Symposium, v. 2, p. 305-336.

References

* Cretaceous geology of Utah Sandstone formations of the United States Siltstone formations of the United States {{Cretaceous-stub

Description

See also

References