Qualla: Grès supérieurs Formation

Grès supérieurs Formation: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PaleoGeekSquared, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1936 the Académie des Sciences in Paris received a short note with a title that reads now like a door swinging open: Découverte du Crétacé en Indochine. Its author was J.-H. Hoffet, a French geologist who had spent his field seasons walking the red sandstone country of southern Laos, and what he had found there were bones — large ones, weathering slowly out of rock nobody had thought to date. The unit he was standing on came to be called the Grès supérieurs, French for "upper sandstone." Nearly a century later it is still handing over animals that exist nowhere else on Earth.

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Grès supérieurs Formation: Rivers That Are No Longer There

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PaleoGeekSquared, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Grès supérieurs is not dramatic rock. Sandstone, siltstone and mudstone, stacked across the Savannakhet Basin and stained a dull iron red, it looks like ground you would drive past without a second glance. The story is in the grain. These are river deposits, laid down between...

Image: PaleoGeekSquared | CC BY-SA 4.0

Grès supérieurs Formation: Hoffet's Names

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PaleoGeekSquared, CC BY-SA 4.0. Hoffet worked quickly and published what he had. In 1942 he described titanosaurian bones from what he called Bas-Laos, lower Laos, and over his career he attached names to the animals he pulled from the sandstone: Titanosaurus falloti for a sauropod, Mandschurosaurus laosensis f...

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Grès supérieurs Formation: The Lizard from Tang Vay

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pescov, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1999 a team led by the French paleontologist Ronan Allain published a new sauropod from the formation and gave it a name that settles an old debt: Tangvayosaurus hoffeti. The genus honours Tang Vay, the village in Savannakhet Province near where the bones emerged; the species ...

Image: Pescov | CC BY-SA 3.0

Grès supérieurs Formation: A Sail Cut in Two

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PaleoGeekSquared, CC BY-SA 4.0. Then came the animal that made the formation internationally famous. In 2012 Allain, working with T. Xaisanavong, P. Richir and B. Khentavong, described Ichthyovenator laosensis from a partial skeleton recovered at Ban Kalum — vertebrae, hips and ribs lifted from a patch of red s...

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Grès supérieurs Formation: Everything Else in the Sandstone

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PaleoGeekSquared, CC BY-SA 4.0. Dinosaurs take the headlines, but the formation preserves a fuller world than that. A gar-like fish, Lanxangichthys alticephalus, swam these channels — a basal lepisosteiform described from Cretaceous rocks in both Laos and Thailand. A freshwater turtle, Shachemys laosiana, has c...

Image: PaleoGeekSquared | CC BY-SA 4.0