218 Kansas Academy of Science. 



At the Natural Corral, a box canyon in section 5 of South 

 Sharps Creek township, McPherson county, there are excellent 

 exposures of both the Kiowa and the Mentor, in which the re- 

 lations to each other and the underlying Permian Wellington 

 shales are well shown. 



On the rim of the canyon is the Mentor, with an exposure 

 more than a mile long. It consists of a hard brown sandstone 

 of about eight feet thickness. This contains the Mentor fauna, 

 but fossils are not nearly so common as they are in some of 

 the exposures in Saline county, and in many places they are 

 extremely rare, or even wanting. Below the fossiliferous beds 

 are from six to twelve feet of yellow, shaly, cross-laminated 

 sandstone, underlying which are from twelve to fifteen feet of 

 very friable sandstone. This is highly cross-laminated, and 

 parallel to the lamellae it is striped with yellow, red, brown 

 and white. This sandstone is readily carved, and at the spring 

 near the head of the corral it bears a record of hundreds of 

 names and dates. No fossils were observed in either of these 

 sand divisions. Below the sands are from thirty to forty feet 

 of blue, black and yellow mud shales, at the base of which 

 there is a two- to four-inch layer of gypsum, with decided 

 cone-in-cone structure. Interstratified in these shales are soft 

 yellow sandstones and sandy shales which at other places in 

 the vicinity have yielded dicotyledonous leaves belonging to 

 "Dakota" species. Such a locality is about two miles east of 

 the corral (14-36). Beneath the shales are two thin beds of 

 limestone, separated by about two feet of shale, each of the 

 limestone beds being approximately six inches thick. In these 

 limestones have been collected sixteen species of Kiowa in- 

 vertebrates. They are underlain by twenty feet of unfossil- 

 iferous blue and black shales, in which are numerous pyrite 

 nodules and selenite crystals. The lowest division of the Co- 

 manchean strata consists of four feet of yellow and gray sand- 

 stone, containing indeterminate plant remains. This division 

 rests on the red and blue shales of the Wellington. 



Throughout the greater portion of South Sharps Creek 

 township the Kiowa shales are excellently exposed on the 

 slopes at about the 1,600-foot contour, and exposures are 

 equally good in southeastern Ellsworth county. About twelve 

 miles west of McPherson and ten miles south of the Corral 

 there are extremely good exposures of both the Kiowa, the 



