214 PROCEEDINGS OF TSE NATIONAL MUSEUM. vol.41. 



become so thin that the Sunbuiy, Bedford, and the underlying black 

 shales seem to become a unit. In Kentucky then, quoting these 

 authors, ''The Ohio black shale of the Kentucky reports or the 

 Chattanooga shale of U. S. reports, south of Petersville, is not of 

 Devonian age alone but of Devonian and Carboniferous; that is, is 

 composed of both the Ohio and Sunbury shales, and a thin zone 

 representing the Bedford and Berea." 



In the Riclunond and other folios of east central Kentucky, the 

 U. S. Geological Survey maps the clay shales and sandstones between 

 the Newman limestone, as identified in this area (St. Louis and 

 Chester), above, and the Chattanooga shale below, as the Waverly 

 formation, giving the Waverly the same limits as in Ohio, save that 

 the lower black shale divisions (Cleveland, Bedford, and Sunbury) 

 with possibly a black shale of Devonian age, are mapped as a unit 

 under the name of Chattanooga shale. 



In central Tennessee the Chattanooga black shale with the under- 

 lying Hardin sandstone undoubtedly represents the deposits of the 

 first submergence following the Devonian emergence. Whenever 

 present the Hardin sandstone almost invariably contains worn, 

 silicified fossils of Ordovician, Silurian, and Devonian age, and in 

 addition shows specimens of many of the fish teeth and conodonts 

 described from typical Cleveland shale in volume 2 of the "Paleon- 

 tology of Ohio." This same fauna occurs in the typical Chatta- 

 nooga shale at many Tennessee locaHties. At Mount Pleasant, Ten- 

 nessee, specimens of the conodonts especially are so numerous that 

 some of the layers at the base of the black shale here are composed 

 almost entirely* of these fossils alone. At Bakers, Tennessee, as 

 indicated in the Bakers-Ridgetop section presented on a later page, 

 these same conodonts and fish teeth are present in both the basal 

 part of the typical black shale and in the Hardin sandstone member 

 of the Chattanooga. The most southern locality where this fauna 

 has been found is near Huntsville, Alabama, where the basal layers 

 of the Chattanooga are crowded with the same conodonts. Although 

 the division line between the Devonian and Carboniferous in Ohio is 

 still in doubt, as indicated in Professor Prosser's paper "Revised 

 Nomenclature of the Ohio Geological Formations," ^ it seems to me 

 that there is sufficient evidence published to justify the regarding of 

 the Chattanooga shale of central Tennessee as basal Waverlyan. 

 That this black shale in central Tennessee is correctly correlated 

 with the Chattanooga shale of the Appalacliian Valley is another 

 question, but I think such a correlation can be proven. 



With the exception of the Rockwood formation of Silurian age, 

 the stratigraphic relations at Chattanooga, Tennessee, the type 

 locality of this shale, are precisely the same as along the eastern rim 



1 Geol. Surv. Ohio, Bull. No. 7, 1905, pp. 2, 17-21. 



