Horseshoe Canyon Formation

Common card · No. 393067

The Horseshoe Canyon Formation is a stratigraphic unit of the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin in southwestern Alberta. It takes its name from Horseshoe Canyon, an area of badlands near Drumheller. The Horseshoe Canyon Formation is part of the Edmonton Group. In its type section (Red Deer River Valley at Drumheller), it is ~250 metres (820 ft) thick, but further west the formation is older and thicker, exceeding 500 metres (1,600 ft) near Calgary. It is of Late Cretaceous age, Campanian to early Maastrichtian stage (Edmontonian Land-Mammal Age), and is composed of mudstone, sandstone, carbonaceous shales, and coal seams. A variety of depositional environments are represented in the succession, including floodplains, estuarine channels, and coal swamps, which have yielded a diversity of fossil material. Tidally-influenced estuarine point bar deposits are easily recognizable as Inclined Heterolithic Stratification (IHS). Brackish-water trace fossil assemblages occur within these bar deposits...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Anky-man 16:33, 16 April 2007, CC BY-SA 3.0