Pierre Shale

The Pierre Shale was described by Meek and Hayden in 1862 in the Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences (Philadelphia). They described it as a dark-gray shale, fossiliferous, with veins and seams of gypsum, and concretions of iron oxide. The Pierre Shale is about 3,138 feet (956m) thick at the type locality. It overlies the Niobrara division and underlies the Fox Hills beds. It was named for an occurrence near Fort Pierre on the Missouri River in South Dakota.

The Pierre Shale is of marine origin and was deposited in the Western Interior Seaway. It is correlative with other marine shales that occur farther west, such as the Bearpaw Shale, Mancos Shale and the Lewis Shale. It correlates with the Lea Park Formation in central Alberta. The Pierre is overlain by marginal marine deposits of the Fox Hills Formation.

Most of the formation was deposited in the Campanian Age of the late Cretaceous. However, the discovery of fossils of Baculites baculus in the uppermost beds of the Pierre Shale in the Raton, New Mexico area show that deposition continued here into the early Maastrichtian.

Mineral resources

The Pierre Shale is the host formation for commercial petroleum deposits in the Florence and Canon City fields in Fremont County, Colorado, and the Boulder Oil Field in Boulder County, Colorado. More recently, natural gas has been extracted in the Raton Basin in southern Colorado. The shale formation is usually too impermeable for hydrocarbon extraction, but produces in areas where it is naturally fractured or fractured by artificial means.