Note on the Gosau Beds of the Neue Welt, west of Wiener Neustadt

Abstract

The Gosau beds have been deposited in preexisting valleys of the Triassic and Rhaeetic portion of our North-eastern Alps, and have suffered so much subsequent folding and dislocation that in the valley of the “Neue Welt,” the spot where the bones were gathered which I sent to you, several shafts pass twice through one and the same seam of coal. The Gosau beds usually form green slopes at the foot of the great mural precipices of Triassic and Rh~etic limestone. In the Gosau valley, near Halstatt, exposures are offered by a series of ravines; in the “Neue Welt” (south of Vienna, west of Wiener Neustadt) a number of coal-mines give the opportunity of following the succession of beds, although they are highly disturbed here; and I believe that the succession is not very different in the two valleys, notwithstanding their distance apart. The base of the Gosau beds is formed by a calcareous breccia of variable thickness, evidently the consolidated ddbris of the surrounding mountains. Then follows a series of freshwater beds, sandstones, marls and a few seams of coal, accompanied by freshwater Mollusca such as Melanopsis, Dejanira, Boysia, Tanalia, Cyclas , and Unio , and the remains of a highly heterogeneous flora, comprising a true Palm, together with Pecopteris Zippi , Microzamia, Cunninghamites , and leaves of a dicotyledonous tree resembling Magnolia, &e., evidently the mingling of the younger dicotyledonous type with a number of surviving older types. It is this horizon which has yielded the reptilian bones. Deposits of a brackish