Chalk Group Lithostratigraphy: Northern England - Totternhoe Stone

In some previous accounts the Totternhoe Stone is referred to as the Grey Bed (Hill, 1888), and is mostly as described in East Anglia and the Chilterns. The dark, grey-brown, gritty, shell-rich sediment, typically a metre of less in thickness, overlies a burrowed erosion surface (locally hardground with glauconitised pebble concentration) (Gaunt et al., 1992). The typically rich brachiopod, echinoid and ammonite fauna differs somewhat from that of the Totterhhoe Stone of East Anglia and the Chilterns (Gaunt et al., 1992), possibly reflecting the different depositional setting of the Northern England Chalk Group, but is nevertheless broadly coeval. Notable elements of the fauna that are distinctive of the northern England succession are the echinoid Echinocorys sphaerica and the belemnite Belemnocamax boweri (regional guide).

Macrofossil Biozonation: A. rhotomagense Zone

Correlation: see Correlation with other UK Chalk Group successions

References

GAUNT, G D, FLETCHER, T P & WOOD, C J. 1992. Geology of the country around Kingston-upon-Hull and Brigg. Memoir of the British Geological Survey.

HILL, W. 1888. On the lower beds of the Upper Cretaceous Series in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, Vol. 44, 320-367.

See: Totternhoe Stone (East Anglia), Totternhoe Stone (Chilterns)