Culpeper Quarry

The quarry is located just east of the town of Culpeper, Virginia. The mudstones are excavated and broken into various size fractions for use as road beds and in other construction projects. The sediments accumulated in a gradually sinking basin formed by the Mesozoic rifting of the eastern margin of North America as the Atlantic Ocean widened. Many rift basins, such as the well known Newark Basin, formed along the eastern coast of the continent during that era. The sediments exposed in the quarry are members of the Newark Supergroup.

Students from the sedimentation and stratigraphy class examine features such as mud cracks and ripple marks preserved on the surfaces of the fine grained rocks. These sedimentary structures indicate that the sediments were deposited in a shallow water body and that the rate of sedimentation kept pace with the progressive deepening of the rift basin.

The preserved foot prints of a Triassic-age theropod dinosaur are found within the quarry. The blue circles in the photograph below outline a set of left and right prints made by the speedy two-legged carnivores. The dinosaur foot prints found in Culpeper are considerably older than the Jurassic-age prints found in the central Connecticut rift valley to the north.