Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A white earthy deposit, crumbling readily on exposure to the air, and resulting from the accumulation of more or less disintegrated fragments of shells.

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word shell-marl.

Examples

  • A few of the upper specimens of the shelly earth, showed it to be sandy and poor shell-marl, of the miocene age.

    Agricultural, Geological, and Descriptive Sketches of Lower North Carolina, and the Similar Adjacent Lands 1861

  • In the state of New York, the mastodon is not unfrequently met with in bogs and lacustrine deposits formed in hollows in the drift, and therefore, in a geological position, much resembling that of Recent peat and shell-marl in the British Isles, Denmark, or the valley of the Somme, as before described.

    The Antiquity of Man Charles Lyell 1836

  • I have also given an account of another striking feature in the physical geography of Perthshire and Forfarshire, which I consider to belong to the same period; namely, a continuous zone of boulder clay, forming ridges and mounds from 50 to 70 feet high (the upper part of the mounds usually stratified), enclosing numerous lakes, some of them several miles long, and many ponds and swamps filled with shell-marl and peat.

    The Antiquity of Man Charles Lyell 1836

  • We also seem to have a test of the comparatively modern origin of the mounds of till which surround the above-mentioned chain of lakes (of which that of Forfar is one), in the species of organic remains contained in the shell-marl deposited at their bottom.

    The Antiquity of Man Charles Lyell 1836

  • In fact, the old river bed, in which bones of the mastodon occur, holds the same position relatively to the boulder formation as the strata of shell-marl and bog-earth with bones of mastodon, so frequent in the State of New

    The Antiquity of Man Charles Lyell 1836

  • Other examples of works of art, such as stone hatchets, canoes, and ships, buried in ancient river-beds in England, and in peat and shell-marl, I have mentioned in my work before cited.

    The Antiquity of Man Charles Lyell 1836

  • Bored for shell-marl in the 'grass-park;' found it in one of the quagmires, but to no great extent.

    The Cruise of the Betsey or, A Summer Ramble Among the Fossiliferous Deposits of the Hebrides. With Rambles of a Geologist or, Ten Thousand Miles Over the Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland Hugh Miller 1829

  • Wernerian Society "as having been obtained from shell-marl in

    The Antiquity of Man Charles Lyell 1836

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.