DEPOSIT OF SHELLS

Greymouth Evening Star, 8 November 1929, Page 2

DEPOSIT OF SHELLS

1000 MILES FROM THE SEA. giFf While road workers were excavating a pit for gravel to surface highways in eastern Colorado, they discovered a vast bed of sea, shells, nearly ten feet deep and covering an area of more than five acres. The huge bed, which geologists state is a relic of the postglacial period when the western part of North America was covered by a great sea, was found near Fort Morgan, Colorado. The most unusual feature of the discovery was the fact that the top of the bed was within three feet of the surface, but as the country where the shell bed is located is sandy, it is apparent that the shifting sand had been blown and washed away by centuries of erosion. Geologists from the State University of Colorado, who have examined the vast shell bed, believe that it would have been exposed in a few years. As sea shells are used to build highways in some of the southern States, this vast bed will be used to surface th© highways of eastern Colorado, more than 1000 miles from either ocean.