Present Day:

Marion Sansom Park sits on a small portion of the Cross Timbers Ecoregion, a region that stretches from Texas, into Oklahoma and portions into Kansas. Elevations range from 500 to 1,500 feet throughout the region and soil composition varies dramatically, consequently growing a large variety of vegetation as some plants prefer certain nutrients from different types of parent rock. These dramatic changes within short distances provides many land use potentials from wildlife management, agriculture, livestock grazing, land management, scientific research and preservation. The Cross Timbers Ecological Region provides habitat management as well as wildlife biodiversity and population density monitoring. Factors like fragmentation have occurred throughout the regions urban areas making migration and gene flow difficult to continue flourishing biodiverse wildlife populations. This is due to poor urban development planning and infrastructure that impedes species from allowing genetic material to flow from one population to another, keeping the gene pool healthy and mixed which prevents them from becoming separate species over time or leading to inbreeding.

Take it back in time:

The parks underlying rock unit is the Fort Worth Limestone, formed during the Cretaceous Period around 145-66 million years ago. This limestone unit contains marine megafossils such as oysters, echinoids and ammonites. During the Cretaceous, North Texas was experiencing a sea level transgression which covered the area in a shallow sea. Sea creatures such as ammonites died and sank to the bottom where they were covered in calcium secreted by other organisms, layering them beneath the sea floor. As the sea regressed, weathering and erosion transformed the topography and exposed the fossils of the marine life that once thrived over the landscape.

Marion Sansom Park. (2020). Fortworthtexas.gov. https://www.fortworthtexas.gov/departments/parks/parks-and-trails/marion-sansom-park

USGS | Pocket Texas Geology. (n.d.). Webapps.usgs.gov. https://webapps.usgs.gov/txgeology/

TPWD:Cross Timbers. (n.d.). Tpwd.texas.gov. https://tpwd.texas.gov/landwater/land/habitats/cross_timbers/ecoregions/cross_timbers.phtml