Bunter Sandstein

Bunter Sandstein, or 'variegated sandstone,' is the lowest member of the Triassic system. As the Trias is more perfectly developed in Germany than in Britain, the German beds are considered the typical group of this system. The bunter sandstein consists of various coloured sandstones, interstratified with red marls and thin beds of limestone, which occasionally, as in the Harz, are oolitic, but in other places dolomitic. They attain a maximum thickness of 1500 feet. The English representatives of the bunter sandstein are chiefly developed in Lancashire and Cheshire, and consist of red and mottled sandstones with beds of marl, and thick rather irregular bands of partially consolidated conglomerate called 'pebble beds.' Many species of fossil plants have been found in the bunter sandstein of Germany, consisting chiefly of ferns, cycads, and conifers. The English bunter sandstein, however, is for the most part unfossiliferous, an equisetum, one or two ferns, and a few conifers being all the plants yet met with. But the most remarkable fossils in this formation are the remains of huge batrachians. Originally, the footprints which had been left by the animals on the moist sand were alone observed. From their resemblance to the impressions made by a human hand, the animal producing them was provisionally named Cheirotherium (q.v.). The subsequent discovery and examination of the remains of teeth and bones in the same beds have afforded sufficient materials to enable Owen to reconstruct an animal named by him Labyrinthodon (q.v.), which undoubtedly produced the footprints. (More recently these footprints have been assigned to more than one form of labyrinthodon.) These remains have been detected in Lancashire and Cheshire, as well as in Germany.