ORISKANY OF MARBLE CITY 667 



The Upper Oriskany near Marble City has the same facies as that of 

 Sainte Genevieve Comity in eastern Missouri, a white, coarsely crystalline 

 limestone made up of fragmented and worn fossils cemented by pure 

 carbonate of lime. This is an unusual facies of the Oriskanian for the 

 United States, since in other places it is either a more or less coarse sand- 

 stone or a decidedly arenaceous limestone appearing in exposures as a 

 porous sandstone. At Gaspe, Canada, the Oriskanian facies is also lime- 

 stone. The former occurrences indicate that the Oriskanian sea of Mis- 

 souri and Oklahoma, extending across the Ozarkian mass, was a warm- 

 water one, and received almost no detrital material from the adjacent 

 lands. Nevertheless, the faunas of these southern places are very similar 

 to those of the northeast. Some of the conspicuous species of the 

 northern faunas, of sandy facies, as Edriocrinus sacculus, Hipparionyx 

 proximiLS, Chonostrophia complanata, the very large Plethorhynchas, 

 Rensselceria ovoides, and Phacops and Flomalonotus, are all absent in the 

 limestone phase of the southern seas. 



Oriskanian of Arbuckle Mountains 



In 1911 Eeeds described the Bois d'Arc thin-bedded crystalline lime- 

 stone of the Arbuckles, a formation varying in thickness from to 90 

 feet, with a general average of 60 feet. He then thought it to be more 

 nearly equivalent to "the Becraft than the New Scotland of the New 

 York section," but added : "It may yet be determined that the uppermost 

 40 feet of the Bois d'Arc are Oriskany in age." He held that deposition 

 with the Helderbergian was continuous, and listed twenty-three species, 

 the following of which are Oriskanian forms : Favosites shriveri, Cyrtina 

 rostrata, Eatonia singalaris, Pletliorhyncha prcespeciosa, Leptostrophia 

 magnified, L. oriskania, Meristella lentiformis, and Rensselceria mary- 

 landica. Because of the absence of guide fossils like Spirifer arenosus 

 and S. murchisoni, we then concluded that the Bois d'Arc was not of 

 Oriskany time, since it had a large number of Helderbergian species. It 

 is now clear that this terminating limestone of the Lower Devonian of 

 the Arbuckles is also of Oriskanian age, and that in all probability the 

 Bois d'Arc does not pass unbroken into the Helderbergian (Haragan), 

 as was then supposed. Here also all of the Lower Oriskanian is absent. 

 Evidently the Arbuckles area lay more nearly in the center of the marine 

 basin and therefore had a far greater thickness of Oriskanian limestone 

 and a longer differentiating fauna, while to the northeast and nearer the 

 shore the deposition was far less, though the present thickness of from 

 5 to 8 feet may be only a remnant of a much thicker series of limestones. 



