ABSTRACT

The Caroline Street molluscan and vertebrate Local Fauna, named for its occurrence in a geotechnical borehole at a depth of about 10 m, along Caroline Street in downtown Houston, Texas, consists of three species of operculate and one species of pulmonate freshwater snails, four species of pearly freshwater mussels (Unionidae) and two chordates: a sucker fish (Catostomidae) and a pit viper (Viperidae). They occur as detrital material in an overbank, backwater (oxbow or avulsed) channel of the late Pleistocene paleo-Brazos River, which deposited that portion of the Beaumont Formation. The multistoried Beaumont is the result of deposition by an aggrading suspended-load meandering stream and represents at least two cycles of channel and pointbar deposition enclosed in overbank sediments containing zones of calcium carbonate accumulations and slickensides that are interpreted as the lower parts of buried soils.