The Ranikot Beds at Thal (North-West Frontier Provinces of India)

Abstract

According to the late E. Vredenburg (28 <i>a</i>), ‘the Ranikot Series is of very limited occurrence, and is entirely unknown outside of a relatively small area in Western Sind.’ It apparently crops out in Sind in three disconnected patches: one being in the Laki Range, another in the Band Vera plain north-west of Kotri, and the third in the neighbourhood of Jhirak. Only the second and third of these outcrops show the Upper (and fossiliferous) Ranikot Beds. In his map of the area (28 <i>b</i>) Vredenburg shows these three blocks of Ranikot Beds as lying between longitudes 67° 40′–68° 20′ east, and latitudes 24° 40′–26° 20′ north (25° 50′ north, in the case of the Upper Ranikot Beds). Later on (28 <i>c</i>), he repeats that ‘beds of lower eocene age are not known anywhere else in India outside the limited area briefly described above.’ ‘In all instances,’ he goes on to say, ‘where certain stratigraphical groups have been assimilated with the Ranikot, closer investigation has shown that they should be regarded as middle eocene.’ This was written in 1909; and Vredenburg seems to have held to these opinions to the end of his life, as regards India, although he admitted as ‘most important,’ in 1923, the discovery by Bankim Behari Gupta of three species of Ranikot gastropods in the lower beds of the Laungshe Shales in Burma, at a spot a mile and a half south of Yeshin, 94° 8′ long, east, 21° 52′ lat. north (30). This being the