SOUTH AMERICAN GEOLOGY 
199 
regard as indicating a Westphalian age, are present at a few locali¬ 
ties in Peru, Bolivia and northwestern Argentina. These are 
followed, in the Titicaca region, by the marine beds which have 
furnished the fossils for which that region has been so notable 
since the days of d’Orbigny’s youthful journey. In striking con¬ 
trast to the austral and provincial nature of the Devonic biota, this 
marine Carbonic fauna is cosmopolitan in facies, and has much 
in common with the Uralian (Stephanian) assemblages found in 
Russia, Asia, and the southwestern portions of the United States. 
So fossiliferous are some of these limestones that one locality has 
received the name of Chulpapampa by the Indians, which in a 
liberal translation, would be fossil-plain, and I have profitably 
employed untrained Indians to collect fossils for me from localities 
that I did not have time to visit. This Uralian flooding appears 
to have been from the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Amazonian 
geosyncline, and no Pacific seaways are known. Both to the west¬ 
ward and southward the sediments change from limestones to 
littoral, plant-bearing beds, and although they lie mainly in the 
Eastern Andean and Inter-Andean belts, they extend west of the 
present Western Andes and reach the present Pacific Coast at 
Paracas, showing the entire absence of anything corresponding to 
the present Western Andes belt of that time. 
Although life was prolific in this Uralian, epicontinental sea, 
transgression was quickly followed by retreat and we have another 
long period of emergence which extended from Late Carbonic 
times entirely through Permian times, and most of the Triassic 
Period. Permian records in South America are entirely con¬ 
tinental in character, as are also those of the Triassic Period, ex¬ 
cept for certain not well authenticated localities of supposed Late 
Triassic deposits in northern Peru. The known Permian outcrops 
and underlies a large area — almost one-half of the total area of 
South America. In Brazil and Argentina ^ the rock sequence 
reaches a thickness of at least 2,000 feet, and shows considerable 
lithologic variation. It is disconformable on whatever lies be¬ 
neath, most often on the so-called crystalline complex; and it 
shows, in a typical south Brazilian section, glacial conglomerates 
4 At this moment there comes to hand a summary of the Permian glacial deposits 
of Argentina. Keidel, J.; Sobre la distribucion de los depositos glaciares del Per- 
mico conocidos en la Argentina—. Bol. Acad. Nac. de Ciencias en Cordoba, tomo 25 , 
1922. 
