382 BRUCE WADE 



Paper 81 of the U.S. Geological Survey L. W. Stephenson has 

 readjusted the nomenclature of the Upper Cretaceous in this 

 region and has defined the Tuscaloosa with reference to the other 

 formations of this series. 



Toward the north the Tuscaloosa deposits become much 

 thinner and are made up almost entirely of conglomerates which 

 contain little sand and clay. Professor E. W. Berry^ has made a 

 study of this series and has found evidence in the fossil plants that 

 the clays, in the basal part of the formation in the region of maxi- 

 mum thickness, are more ancient than plant-bearing clays that 

 occur in the conglomerates about luka in northeastern Missis- 

 sippi where the formation becomes much thinner. He shows that 

 an Upper Cretaceous estuary existed for a long time in western 

 Alabama before it transgressed into the northern part of Mississippi 

 and Alabama. 



Until recently the Tuscaloosa formation was thought to thin 

 out entirely in the vicinity of the Tennessee-Alabama line. In 

 1 9 13 H. D. Miser mapped the areal geology of the Waynesboro 

 quadrangle of Tennessee and found that the Tuscaloosa was one 

 hundred and fifty feet^ thick and extended over a large part of 

 Wayne County. Subsequent work by the Tennessee Geological 

 Survey showed that remnants of the Tuscaloosa gravel occur in 

 place of the highland rim of Tennessee as far north as northern 

 Lewis County.^ Farther north, during the summer of 19 16, the 

 writer encountered undescribed occurrences of the Tuscaloosa 

 formation which show that the sediments of this transgressive 

 phase of the Upper Cretaceous exist in a chain of local outlying 

 areas across the state of Tennessee and as far north as the ridge 

 west of Canton, Kentucky.^ 



An important link in this chain are the gravels which occur 

 locally along the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. , Louis Railroad 

 between McEwen and Tennessee City and capping the higher hills 



' E. W. Berry, U.S.G.S. Prof. Paper No. 112 (1919). 



2 H. D. Miser, "Economic Geology of the Waynesboro Quadrangle," Resources 

 of Tennessee, Vol. IV, No. 3 (1913), p. 107. 



3 Bruce Wade, "Geology of Perry County and Vicinity," Resources of Tennessee, 

 Vol. IV, No. 4 (1914), p. 173; "The Occurrence of the Tuscaloosa Formation as Far 

 North as Kentucky," Johns Hopkins Univ. Cir. (March, 191 7). 



