Full Title: The Hell Creek Formation and the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary in the Northern Great Plains: An Integrated Continental Record of the End of the Cretaceous

Editors: Joseph H. Hartman, Kirk R. Johnson, and Douglas J. Nichols

This volume offers new and well-integrated studies from uppermost cretaceous Hell Creek Formation exposures in the Williston Basin of North and South Dakota and Montana. As a timely synthesis, this volume resolves questions concerning the paleontological record of the end of the Cretaceous and the faunal and floral transition into the Paleocene in central North America and presents new analyses on fossil turtles, dinosaurs, mammals, mollusks, insects, plants, palynomorphs, and trace fossils, as well as litho- and magnetostratigraphy and movements of the Western Interior Seaway.

Although the Hell Creek Formation of the northern Great Plains is the most thoroughly sampled source of paleontological and geological data used to evaluate changes in nonmarine faunas and floras across the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K/T) boundary, much debate has ensued over the K/T boundary record in the Fort Peck area because of an incomplete knowledge of the patterns of faunal and floral changes through the entire Hell Creek Formation. The patterns of biotic change throughout the Hell Creek Formation presented here are stratigraphically well documented. In 19 separate chapters, by experts in their respective fields, this contribution adroitly places answers to many end-Cretaceous questions on a data-rigorous foundation upon which others will ultimately build a more comprehensive picture of nonmarine and marine conditions at the end of the Cretaceous and earliest Paleocene in North America.

[ Table of Contents ]

Published: 10/17/2002

ISBN Number: 0813723612

Pages: 520

Product Category: EBooks