"Detailed recounting of the first government-sponsored geological survey of the Wyoming and adjacent territories in 1868. The results of Hayden's survey provided the earliest descriptive stratigraphic-structural profile across the Rocky Mountains and the initial discovery of dinosaur tracks in western North America"--

With its thickness of more than 15 km of strata, covering some 200,000 km2, the Belt basin displays one of the planet's largest, best-exposed, most accessible, and best-preserved sequences of Mesoproterozoic sedimentary and igneous rocks. This volume focuses on research into this world-class province; kindles ideas about this critical era of Earth evolution; and covers aspects of the basin from its paleontology, mineralogy, sedimentology, and stratigraphy to its magmatism, ore deposits, geophysics, and structural geology.

This volume is a compendium of research on the Belt Supergroup. It is an outgrowth of Belt Symposium IV, held in Salmon, Idaho, in July, 2003, in conjunction with the Tobacco Root Geological Society annual field conference. Because of the geographic extent and great thickness of the Belt Supergroup, years of work have been required before conclusions are "bona fide". The Mesoproterozoic Belt Supergroup of western Montana and adjacent areas is geologically and economically important, but it has been frustratingly hard to understand. The previous Belt Symposium volumes offer an historical view of the progress of the science of geology in the western United States. The advent of U-Pb geochronology, especially using the ion microprobe (SHRIMP) and laser-ablation ICPMS, has injected geochronometric reality into long-standing arguments about Belt stratigraphy. Several papers in this volume utilize these new tools to provide constraints on age and correlation of Belt strata (Chamberlain et al., Lewis et al., Link et al., and Doherty et al.)

In this Special Paper, Hildebrand and Whalen present a big-picture, paradigm-busting synthesis that examines the tectonic setting, temporal relations, and geochemistry of many plutons within Cretaceous batholithic terranes of the North American Cordillera. In addition to their compelling tectonic synthesis, they argue that most of the batholiths are not products of arc magmatism as commonly believed, but instead were formed by slab failure during and after collision. They show that slab window and Precambrian TTG suites share many geochemical similarities with Cretaceous slab failure rocks. Geochemical and isotopic data indicate that the slab failure magmas were derived dominantly from the mantle and thus have been one of the largest contributors to growth of continental crust. The authors also note that slab failure plutons emplaced into the epizone are commonly associated with Cu-Au porphyries, as well as Li-Cs-Ta pegmatites.