The Stratigraphy of the Wenlock Limestone of Dudley

Abstract

The Wenlock Limestone of the three small inliers of Salopian rocks which occur in South Staffordshire and the detached parts of Worcestershire near the town of Dudley has long been famous for the rich variety of its fossils. Dr. Plot figured some of these in 1686, and two hundred and fifty years later Professor Gignoux writes of “le petit affleurement de Dudley (calcaire de Dudley) qui a enrichi les collections du monde entier”. To quote Charles Lapworth: “It may be safely asserted that the majority of the finest examples of British Silurian fossils now enriching the public and private geological collections, both in Britain and abroad, were originally obtained from the Silurian rocks of the Birmingham district;” and the Wenlock or “Dudley” Limestone is by far the most fossiliferous division of these rocks. It has yielded numerous type specimens, including many of those described in The Silurian System , but in spite of the importance of the outcrops from the view-point of palæontology, and of the countless maps which were made of them by successive generations of students under Lapworth, detailed stratigraphical literature is scanty. Since the time of Murchison no publication has greatly supplemented the description contained in The Silurian System (1839, pp. 483–7), though a later account, containing a faunal list, was given by J. B. Jukes in his memoir of the South Staffordshire coalfield (1859, pp. 106–17), and brief but vivid reviews of the stratigraphy and structure of the outcrops were included in papers on the geology of