Maleri Fm

Pranhita-Godavari Basin: Fossiliferous beds near village Maleri, first noticed by Hislop (1864) were grouped with the Kota Fm fish beds and designated as the Kota-Maleri 'Stage' by Hughes (1876). King (1881) differentiated these two formations. It is named after the village Maleri, Telangana. [Original Publication: Hughes, T.W.H. 1876. On the relations of the fossiliferous strata at Maleri and Kota, near Sironcha, Central Province. Rec. Geol. Surv. Ind., 9(3), 63-114.; King, W. 1881. The geology of the Pranhita-Godavari valley. Mem. Geol. Surv, Ind., 18(30), 150-311;].

[Figure 1: Geological map depicting exposures of the Maleri Formation in the Pranhita-Godavari valley (modified after Kutty et al. 1987; Kutty and Sengupta 1989; and Bandyopadhyay and Sengupta 2006; Dasgupta et al., 2017). Major sheet-sandstone bodies of the Maleri Formation are marked within the formation in white. The litholog presented below was measured along the line A–A'. Poorly exposed areas of the Maleri Formation are marked with stipples (adopted from Dasgupta et al., 2017)]

Siltstone. Maleri Formation is represented by a mudstone dominated, nearly 400-m-thick fluvial succession deposited under a semi-arid climate (Sarkar, 1988). It is divisible into a lower part (100–150 m thick) comprising vertically stacked siltstone dominated intervals, and an upper part (200–300 m thick) containing multistoried, sheet sandstone, vertically separated by comparatively thicker siltstone-dominated intervals (Dasgupta and Ghosh, 2018).

[Figure 2: Sedimentological log of the Maleri Formation along the transect A–A' marked in the geiological map. The base (0 in A) is at the contact with the underlying Bhimaram Formation, and the top (522 in B) is at the contact with the overlying Dharmaram Formation. The horizontal axis represents grain size of the sediments (M for mud, S for sand, and G for gravel) and the vertical scale is in meters (adopted from Dasgupta et al., 2017)]

The Maleri Formation has two Vertebrate assemblages, which have led to a biochronological subdivision into lower (Carnian) and upper (Norian) horizons (Kutty and Sengupta 1989).

Lower Maleri fauna comprises: Fishes: Mooreodontus indicus (Jain 1980), Ptychoceratodus (Ceratodus) virapa (Oldham 1859; Martin et al., 1999), Ptychoceratodus (Ceratodus) hislopianus (Oldham 1859; Martin et al., 1999); Amphibian: Panthasaurus (Metoposaurus) maleriensis (Roy Chowdhury, 1965; Hunt, 1993; Sengupta 2002; Chakravorti and Sengupta, 2018); Reptiles; Malerisaurus robinsonae (Chatterjee, 1980), Hyperodapedon (Paradapedon) huxleyi (Lydekker, 1881; von Huene 1938; Chatterjee, 1974), Parasuchus hislopi (Lydekker, 1885; Chatterjee, 1978), cf. Angistorhinus (aff. Rutiodon) (Hungerbuhler et al., 2002), cf. Typothorax (Jain and Roy Chowdhury, 1987), Alwalkeria maleriensis (Chatterjee, 1987), cf. Massospondylus sp. (Kutty et al., 1987), Exaeretodon statisticae (Chatterjee, 1982), Deccanodon maleriensis (Nath and Yadagiri, 2007).

Upper Maleri Formation comprises: Fishes: Xenacanthus indicus (Jain 1980), Mooreodontus indicus, Arganodus (Ceratodus) nageswari (Shah and Satsangi 1969; Skrzycki et al. 2018), Polyacrodus ?Contrarius (Prasad et al., 2008), Subholostean incertae sedis. (Jain et al. 1964); Amphibians: Compsocerops cosgriffi, Kuttycephalus triangularis (Sengupta, 1995); Reptiles: Angistorhinus sp. (Rutiodon) (Hungerbuhler et al., 2002), cf. Leptosuchus (Hungerbuhler et al., 2002), Aetosauria indet. (Kutty et al. 1987; Bandyopadhyay and Sengupta, 2006), Nambalia roychowdhurii, Jaklapallisaurus asymmetrica, Guaibasauridae indet., Dinosauriformes indet., (Novas et al., 2011), cf. Ischigualastia (Edler, 2000).

Although megaflora consisting Schizoneura sp., Neocalamites sp., Caldophlebis indica, Cladophlebis sp., Glossopteris indica, G. communis, G. stricta, G. retifera, Thinfoldia hughesi, Dicroidium odontopteriodes, Noeggerathiopsis sp., Nilsonia sp., Zamites sp., Podozamites sp., Taeniopteris spatulata, Pagiophyllum sp., Elatocladus conferata, Araucarites cutchensis, Araucarioxylon, Mesembrioxylon and Tetraceoxylon (source Bose, 1966c, Rajnikanth 1994, Peter, 2009) has been reported, this assemblage comes from the combined Kota Fm – Maleri Fm ).

References

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