Over the greater part of this region the Triassic beds are free from folding and are nearly horizontal, but faulting is by no means absent, especially along the margins of the Bohemian and Rhenish hills.
During the Triassic and Jurassic periods the genus Baiera - no doubt a representative of the Ginkgoales--was widely spread throughout Europe and in other regions; Ginkgo itself occurs abundantly in Mesozoic and Tertiary rocks, and was a common plant in the Arctic regions as elsewhere during the Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous periods.
Represented by casts of Triassic age, Equisetites arenaceus and other species, probably possessed the power of secondary growth in thickness; the cones were of the modern type, and the rhizomes occasionally formed large underground tubers like those frequently met with in Equisetum arvense, E.
In Dauphin county is a quarry of bluish-brown Triassic sandstone that has been used extensively especially in Philadelphia, for the erection of the so-called brown stone fronts.
The lode was an ore channel of great dimensions included within volcanic rocks of Tertiary age, themselves broken through pre-existing strata of Triassic age, and exhibited some of the features of a fissure vein, combined in part with those of a contact deposit and in part with those of a segregated vein.
As in other parts of the earth, the Triassic was the age of gymnosperms, which were represented by diverse types.
This is shown by palaeontological evidence; and some of the most successful bores, such as those at Coonamble, Moree, Gil Gil and Euroka, have pierced rocks of Triassic age, corresponding with the Ipswich Coal Measures.
Across the moors, on the western side of the anticline, the vast and dense population of the Lancashire coal-field is crowded in the manufacturing towns surrounding the great commercial centre, Manchester, which itself stands on the edge of the Triassic plain.
In the centre of the folds fossiliferous beds with crinoids have been found, and the black slates at the top of the series contain Myophoria and other fossils, indicating that the rocks are of Triassic age.
Neumayr adduced the Triassic sea-urchin Tiarechinus, in which the apical system forms half of the test, as an argument for the origin of Echinoidea from an ancestor in which the apical system was of great importance; but a genus appearing so late in time, in an isolated sea, under conditions that dwarfed the other echinoid dwellers therein, cannot seriously be thought to elucidate the origin of pre-Silurian Echinoidea, and the recent discovery of an intermediate form suggests that we have here nothing but degenerate descendants of a well-known Palaeozoic family (Lepidocentridae).