ABSTRACT: The Late Early Miocene Sabine River

Earl Manning

Work on a new late early Miocene vertebrate fossil site, in a paleochannel deposit of the upper Carnahan Bayou Member of the lower Fleming Formation, has revealed unexpected data on the course and nature of the Sabine River of that time. Screen washing for smaller vertebrate remains at the site, just west of the Sabine River in Newton County, central eastern Texas, has resulted in the recovery of early Permian, Early Cretaceous, Late Cretaceous (Maestrichtian), Paleocene/Eocene, late Eocene, and Oligocene/Miocene fossils, in addition to the main early Miocene fauna.

The reworked fossils, as well as distinctive mineral grains, show that the late early Miocene Sabine River was connected to the Texas/Oklahoma/Arkansas boundary section of the Red River, as well as to rivers draining the southern Ouachita Mountains. These rivers must have joined the Texas/Louisiana boundary section of the Sabine River somewhere in northwest Louisiana at that time. This suggests that the Louisiana section of the present Red River pirated the Texas/Oklahoma/Arkansas boundary section of the river some time after the early Miocene.

The preservation of recognizable fossils transported hundreds of miles in a large river itself requires explanation. It is speculated here that the late early Miocene Sabine River incorporated a large amount of the then recently deposited volcanic ash from the Trans-Pecos Volcanic Field. Montmorillonite clay from the altered volcanic ash would have made the river very turbid, which could have allowed coarse sandsized particles to be carried in the suspended load of the river, rather than in its bed load (where they would have been destroyed by the rolling chert gravel). Additional evidence for such long-distance fossil transport in the late early Moicene rivers of the western Gulf Coastal Plain comes from the abundant Cretaceous fossils of the upper Oakville Formation of southeast Tex s and the Siphonina davisi zone of the southeast Texas subsurface.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90999©1990 GCAGS and Gulf Coast Section SEPM Meeting, Lafayette, Louisiana, October 17-19, 1990