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    Ancient Denvers: Scenes from the Past 300 Million Years of the Colorado Front Range
    Ancient Denvers: Scenes from the Past 300 Million Years of the Colorado Front Range
    Ancient Denvers: Scenes from the Past 300 Million Years of the Colorado Front Range
    Ebook84 pages59 minutes

    Ancient Denvers: Scenes from the Past 300 Million Years of the Colorado Front Range

    By Kirk Johnson, Jan Vriesen, Gary Stabb and Donna Braginetz

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    About this ebook

    A look at how the geology, environment, and landscape of what is now Denver has changed over the millennia.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChicago Review Press
    Release dateMar 27, 2020
    ISBN9781682752845
    Ancient Denvers: Scenes from the Past 300 Million Years of the Colorado Front Range

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      Book preview

      Ancient Denvers - Kirk Johnson

      300 million years ago

      Ancestral Rockies—Fountain Formation

      BEST VIEWING SPOTS:

      Garden of the Gods Park and Visitor Center

      Roxborough State Park

      Red Rocks Park and Amphitheatre

      Boulder Flatirons

      An utterly odd Colorado lies before you, where millipedes are as large as snowboards, and dinosaurs have not yet evolved. Colorado has mountains but it also has coastlines on both its eastern and western borders. These mountains are part of a range that stretches southeast from Colorado, extending all the way to Arkansas. The surrounding forests are relatively new to the planet and are completely different from the forests to come. Gravelly streams flowing off the mountains wind through forests of 100-foot-tall scale trees and giant relatives of the horsetail rush. Buzzing insects such as dragonflies are huge; while fin-backed protomammals, reptiles, and amphibians are relatively small.

      A giant horsetail tree fossilized in the cliffs high above Minturn, Colorado.

      The Fountain Formation contains chunks of granite and quartz, remnants of a lost mountain range.

      The bottom layer of the 12,000-foot-thick pile of sedimentary rock beneath Denver is the Fountain Formation. It is a 1,200-foot-thick heap of red sandstone that lies directly on top of much older, tortured melted rocks. Three hundred million years ago, the red sandstone was loose sand in the bottom of riverbeds. Now stone, the sandstone layers rest deep below Denver, but on the upturned basin margin they form the first rampart of flatirons along the Front Range. A close look at the rocks shows two big clues to their origin: (1) the cobbles of quartz and granite; and (2) the fossilized cross sections of ancient river sandbars. These features tell us that lively streams flowed from a place made of granite. Just like the granite cobble-choked streams that flow off the flanks of Pikes Peak today, so too did these ancient streams flow from a mountain made of granite. To the north, east, and west, the Fountain Formation grades into rocks that were formed beneath the sea, showing that part of Colorado was an island in a great inland

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