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Cretaceous   Listen
adjective
Cretaceous  adj.  
1.
Having the qualities of chalk; abounding with chalk; chalky; as, cretaceous rocks and formations. See Chalk.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Cretaceous" Quotes from Famous Books



... hidden under laterite. The median zone is composed largely of crystalline rocks with granites and some Palaeozoic unfossiliferous rocks. The littoral zone contains the only fossiliferous strata. These are of Tertiary and Cretaceous ages, the latter rocks resting on a reddish sandstone of older date. The Cretaceous rocks of the Dombe Grande region (near Benguella) are of Albian age and belong to the Acanthoceras mamillari zone. The beds containing Schloenbachia inflata are referable to the Gault. Rocks of Tertiary age ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various

... might add, came to your province some three million years ago and is now being exhumed from one of the cut-banks of the Red Deer River. He belongs to the Mesozoic order of archisaurian gentlemen known as Dinosauria, and there's about a car-load of him. This interest in one of your cretaceous dinosaur skeletons would imply, of course, that I'm wedded to science. And I am, though to nothing else. I'm as free as the wind, dear lady, or I wouldn't be holidaying here with a tractor-plow that makes my legs ache and a prairie Penelope, who, for some reason or other, has the power of making ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer

... to the recognition of the changes connected with the Periods. As I shall have occasion hereafter to enter into this subject more at length, I will only allude briefly here to the circumstances. In so doing I am anticipating the true geological order, because I must treat of the Jurassic and Cretaceous deposits, which are still far in advance of us; but as it was by the study of these deposits that the circumscription of the Periods, as I have defined them above, was first ascertained, I must allude ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... all the successive species in these classes. But no one has yet overturned the arguments of Hutton and Lyell, that the lowest formations known to us are only those which have escaped being metamorphosed ; if we argued from some considerable districts, we might have supposed that even the Cretaceous system was that in which life first appeared. From the number of distant points, however, in which the Silurian system has been found to be the lowest, and not always metamorphosed, there are some objections to Hutton's and Lyell's view; but we must not forget ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin

... the length of that period in years. The relative duration is clear, tho the absolute duration may not be definable. The attempt to affix any precise date to the period at which the chalk sea began or ended its existence is baffled by difficulties of the same kind. But the relative age of the cretaceous epoch may be determined with as great ease and certainty as the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various

... which form the Balearic Isles fall naturally into two divisions. There is an older series, ranging from the Devonian to the Cretaceous, which is folded and faulted and forms all the higher hills, and there is a newer series of Tertiary age, which lies nearly horizontal and rests unconformably upon the older beds. The direction of the folds in the older ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... Glen. The Glen, eroded in vertical silurian slate, is less than a mile long. Poole rests by the creek where the gorge opens quite abruptly on to a vast cretaceous plain. Photo by the ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc

... through a succession of geological epochs, sedimentation had proceeded so that the accumulations of Palaeozoic and Mesozoic times had collected in the geosyncline formed by their own ever increasing weight. The site of the future Laramide range was in late Cretaceous times occupied by some 50,000 feet of sedimentary deposits; but the limit had apparently been attained, and at this time the Laramide range, as well as its southerly continuation into the United States, the Rockies, had their beginning. Chamberlin and ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly

... This stickiness was apparently due to the presence of innumerable lumps of a transparent, gelatinous substance, consisting of minute granules without discoverable nucleus or membranous envelope, and interspersed with cretaceous coccoliths. After a description of the structure of this substance and its chemical reactions, he makes a careful proviso against confounding the statement of fact in the description and the interpretation which he proceeds to ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... thickness of the peat-bog represents a phase in the progressive change from wood-tissue to lignite, using this term with its common signification to indicate, not necessarily carbonized ligneous tissue, but plant-tissue that belongs to a past though modern geological age—i.e., Tertiary, Cretaceous, Jurassic, or Triassic. These lignites or modern coals are only peat beds which have been buried for a longer or shorter time under clay, sand, or solidified rock, and have progressed farther or less far on the road to coal. As ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various

... valleys are some fifteen miles of chalky hills almost bare of trees, a dreary track to cross at any time, but especially detestable when the dust lies thick upon the white road and the summer sun is blazing overhead. But how delightful is the contrast when, going down at length from these cretaceous uplands, where even the potato plants look as if they had been whitewashed, you see below the verdant valley of the Dronne, that seems to be blessed with eternal spring, the gay flash of the winding stream, the grand rocks that appear to be standing ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... nor is there any authority on earth (always excepting the Dean of Christ Church) which could make it credible to me. I am sick of Mr. Canning. There is not a "ha'porth of bread to all this sugar and sack." I love not the cretaceous and incredible countenance of his colleague. The only opinion in which I agree with these two gentlemen is that which they entertain of each other. I am sure that the insolence of Mr. Pitt, and the unbalanced accounts of Melville, ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith

... established by palaeontological proofs. He thinks he has been able to fix upon the true point of division between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic ages, and to prove that coal was deposited through about 7,000 feet of Cretaceous and about 4,500 feet of Cenozoic beds. Mr. Powell's literary style is excellent—not involved, but clear and energetic. He was wise to abandon the idea of publishing an itinerary, which would, as he says, "encumber ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various



Words linked to "Cretaceous" :   geological period, Mesozoic, Cretaceous period, period



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