Bending stone
Richard points out an area on the mountain to you. Can you see where the rock layers have folded into a wavy shape? How did this happen?
Richard: So looking at these walls, you see that there’s a lot of contortion of the sedimentary beds all of these would have been originally horizontal.
Point of View – Richard looks up at a mountain ridge. Layers of bent and folded rock stand vertically along the ridge.
Richard: And at sea level or below sea level for some of the marine rocks, which are in the area. The dinosaur tracks are in the Gorman Creek Formation, which is a primarily terrestrial formation and about 135 million years old.
Richard walks closer towards the mountain ridge. Rocky debris from erosion is visible on the slopes.
Richard: But in this area, we’ve had a lot of plate tectonic action, which is caused a lot of this folding that you can see. So you see that there’s some beds that are kind of bowed upwards. Those are called anticlines. So they are like a bump.
Richard points at the mountain slope and traces upwards with his finger. Overlayed white lines follow his finger’s path.
Richard: And then then they come down and up again in the depressions are called synclines and back to another anticline and on and on and on, over the whole wall.
Richard traces downwards then upwards again making a wavy path along the mountain slope.