The Caroline Street Local Fauna and the Genesis of the Associated Late Pleistocene Beaumont Formation in the City of Houston, Harris County, Texas

ARONOW, SAUL, Lamar University, Beaumont, TX, RAYMOND W. NECK, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, Austin, TX, and WILLIAM L. MCCLURE, Houston, TX

The Caroline Street molluskan and vertebrate local fauna, named for its occurrence in a geotechnical borehole along Caroline Street about 10 m below the surface in downtown Houston, consists of three species of operculate and one species of pulmonate freshwater snails, four species of pearly freshwater mussels (Unionidae), and two chordates: a sucker fish (Catostomidae) and a pit viper (Viperidae). They occur as detrital material in an overbank, backwater (oxbow or avulsed) channel of the late Pleistocene paleo-Brazos River that deposited the local segment of the Beaumont Formation. The multistoried Beaumont was deposited by an aggrading suspended-load meandering stream and represents at least two cycles of channel and pointbar deposition enclosed in overbank sediments containing zone of calcium carbonate accumulations and slickensides which are interpreted as the lower parts of truncated buried soils.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #91006 © 1991 GCAGS and GC-SEPM Meeting, Houston, Texas, October 16-18, 1991 (2009)