26. Severy Shales. These shales are blue below, varying through yellow to black in places above the coal. They are fifty to seventy-five feet in thickness. The texture varies, and in the upper part they contain the Osage coal, which is mined at Topeka, Burlingame, Osage City, and other places.
In correlating isolated sections the rocks between the Topeka limestone and the Barclay (= Burlingame = Wyckoff, etc.) limestone have been somewhat confused. Under the title, “Stratigraphy of the Kansas Coal Measures,”[[5]] Haworth describes them as follows: “Above them (Topeka limestones) lies another shale bed fifty feet thick, at the top of which lies the Topeka coal, a seam about eleven inches thick, which has been mined in different places. The coal is immediately overlaid by two thin limestone beds, separated by less than three feet of shales. Above the limestone is the Osage City shale, more than 100 feet thick, at the top of which is the Osage coal, averaging eighteen or twenty inches thick.... Above the Osage coal is a thin limestone system [formation], superseded in turn by the Burlingame shales, a body about 150 feet thick in the vicinity of Burlingame, and possibly more in places. Both the Burlingame and Osage City shales extend for long distances to the southwest and northeast, and are important landmarks in stratigraphy.” Bennett[[6]] describes the succession at Topeka correctly, but supposes the coal above the Topeka coal corresponds to the Osage horizon, instead of to the one already indicated in this paper as its equivalent.
Haworth’s statement in Vol. I, p. 162, of the Kansas Survey, is practically a repetition of the one just quoted, but he corrects the correlation of the coals in a foot-note at the bottom of page 161. In volume III of the same reports (p. 94) he uses the term “Osage shales” for all the shales between the Topeka limestone and the Barclay limestone. The section is correctly given by Hall in his “Section from Boicourt to Alma,”[[7]] though it is not clear just what is meant by his “Osage City Shales, Coal, and Limestone.”
From the foregoing, it will be seen that the terms “Osage City” and “Burlingame,” when strictly applied, are proposed for one and the same set of rocks, namely, those above the Osage-Topeka coal, while the shales below the coal and above the Hartford limestone are not designated at all. Later, in Vol. III of the University Survey (p. 66), in quoting Doctor Adams’s notes, Professor Haworth gives the following: “Severy Shales.—‘Above the Elk Falls limestone is a bed of shales averaging fifty to seventy-five feet in thickness, which, with the protected limestones above, forms a light escarpment that may be traced from a few miles below Eureka to Cedar valley, forming a line from two to five miles west of the Elk Falls escarpment. This shale bed is therefore sufficiently prominent to be recognized in the field, and to be of considerable local and stratigraphic importance. The town of Severy lies within it, and therefore it may be called the Severy shales.’” Dr. George I. Adams, of the United States Geological Survey, under whose direction the work of correlating the Coal Measures rocks of Kansas was done last summer, informs me that the names used in this paper and accredited to him have been passed upon by the committee on nomenclature, and he has kindly permitted me to use them in advance.
So far as known these shales are not fossiliferous, save for a few fragments of fern leaves, below the coal, but are very fossiliferous locally just above it.
Lophophyllum profundum (Milne-Edwards and Haime) Foerste.
Ceriocrinus craigi (Worthen) Wachsmuth and Springer.
Ceriocrinus harshbargeri Beede.
Ceriocrinus hemisphericus (Shumard) Wachsmuth and Springer. These three species of crinoids are from the dump, and may be from the shales between the two layers of the Howard limestone above.
Spirorbis sp.