Old Red Sandstone - History of Study

History of Study

In 1787 James Hutton noted what is now known as Hutton's Unconformity at Inchbonny, Jedburgh, and in the spring of 1788 he set off with John Playfair to the Berwickshire coast and found more examples of this sequence in the valleys of the Tower and Pease Burns near Cockburnspath. They then took a boat trip from Dunglass Burn east along the coast with the geologist Sir James Hall of Dunglass and at Siccar Point found what Hutton called "a beautiful picture of this junction washed bare by the sea", where 345 million year old Devonian Old Red Sandstone overlies 425 million year old Silurian greywacke.

In the early 19th century, the paleontology of the formation was studied intensively by Hugh Miller, Henry Thomas De la Beche, Roderick Murchison, and Adam Sedgwick -- Sedgwick's interpretation was the one that placed it in the Devonian: in fact it was he who coined the name of that period. The term 'Old Red Sandstone' was originally used in 1821 by Scottish naturalist and mineralogist Robert Jameson to refer to the red rocks which underlay the 'Mountain Limestone' i.e. the Carboniferous Limestone. They were thought at that time to be the British version of Germany's Rotliegendes, which is in fact of Permian age. Many of the science of stratigraphy's early debates were about the Old Red Sandstone.

Note that in older geological works predating theories of plate tectonics, the United States' Catskill Delta formation is sometimes referred to as part of the Old Red Sandstone. In the modern day, however, it is recognized that the two are not stratigraphically continuous but are very similar due to being formed at approximately the same time by the same processes.