658 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BALTIMORE MEETING 



north of the James river. Unfortunately no fossil plants are known from the 

 Cape Fear formation. These are to be expected locally in clay lenses after the 

 manner of their occurrence to the northward, where they are also extremely 

 local. The attitude of the North Carolina ooastal plain, with its almost con- 

 tinuous mantle of Tertiary or surficial deposits, renders exposures compara- 

 tively scarce, and this factor, combined with the more uniformly unfavorable 

 conditions for fossilization, has thus far rendered our search for fossils unsuc- 

 cessful. 



The Upper Cretaceous of North Carolina 



The only Upper Cretaceous formation with which I am concerned is the 

 basal one in this region which marks the transition to the typically marine 

 deposits of the Peedee formation. It has been named the Black Creek forma- 

 tion by Earle Sloan because of the exposures along Black creek in South 

 Carolina. 



The most northern outcrops of this formation are found in the banks of the 

 Tar river in the vicinity of Tarboro, where they are strikingly unconformable 

 on the Cape Fear formation. Going southward, they are again seen along the 

 Neuse river for a distance of about 20 miles from Blackmans bluff to Golds- 

 boro, and likewise often seen to be unconformably underlain by Cape Fear 

 deposits. 



Similar exposures are met with in force along the Black river for a distance 

 of about 30 miles. It is along the Cape Fear river, however, that the section 

 is most complete. In this region these beds are found from Rockfish creek 

 near Hope mills, which is a few miles west of Fayetteville to Donohue Creek 

 landing, a distance by the river of something like 65 miles. To the landward 

 they rest with marked unconformity on the Cape Fear formation. Coastward 

 they disappear beneath the typical green sand of the Peedee, which overlies 

 them conformably. 



The materials are largely laminated sands and lignitic clays. The sands are 

 micaceous and iron stained and of a loose sugary character, often cross-bedded. 

 The usually dark clays are very lignitic and usually thinly laminated. Local 

 lenses of brownish clay carry an abundant flora, which is also present in less 

 abundance in the dark laminated clays. Amber in small globules is uniformly 

 distributed. Toward the top of the formation glauconite makes its appearance 

 in pockets and lenses, accompanied by teredo-bored logs, sharks' teeth, and 

 marine invertebrates. 



About 75 species of fossil plants have been collected from this horizon in 

 North Carolina. These are distributed among 24 localities, the bulk, however, 

 coming from a single outcrop, that at Court House bluff on the Cape Fear 

 river, about 39 miles below Fayetteville and 76 miles above Wilmington. The 

 Black Creek formation is tentatively correlated with the Upper Tuscaloosa 

 and Eutaw formations of Alabama, the Middendorf and Black Creek forma- 

 tions of South Carolina, the Magothy and Matawan formations of New Jersey, 

 Delaware, and Maryland, the Woodbine formation of Texas, and the Dakota 

 group of the western interior. It finds its parallel in the Atane and Patoot 

 beds of Greenland. It is difficult to be more exact at the present time, but it 

 seems probable that the Black creek more nearly represents the Magothy- 

 Matawan formations of the more northern Coastal plain rather than the Rari- 



