El Capitan in Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Credit: NPS
SciTechDaily has a piece about the Guadalupe Mountains, which span Texas and New Mexico. There are two National Parks in the Guadalupe Mountains, Guadalupe Mountains National Park and Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. During the Permian Period, these mountains were part of a reef on the edge of a shallow sea. The area is loaded with marine fossils. It's a great place to learn a little geology and paleontology on a summer vacation.
Rocks that once lay beneath an ancient sea now rise to form some of the tallest peaks in Texas. Towering above the Chihuahuan Desert in West Texas and southern New Mexico, the Guadalupe Mountains are part of one of the world’s best-preserved fossil reefs from the Permian Period. This hardened layer of ancient plant and animal remains provides a detailed snapshot of marine life just before the mass extinction that ended the Permian.
The Texas portion of the range lies within Guadalupe Mountains National Park, established in 1972. The park’s boundaries are visible in the satellite image above, captured by the OLI-2 (Operational Land Imager-2) aboard Landsat 9 on July 7, 2024. To the northeast, the fossil reef continues into New Mexico, where sulfuric acid has dissolved portions of the limestone, creating the vast underground chambers of Carlsbad Caverns National Park.
Texas’s Guadalupe Mountains were once an ancient reef on the edge of a shallow sea. Now they form some of the highest and most fossil-rich peaks in the state, offering a rare look into a prehistoric underwater world turned mountain range.
