[OokieWonderslug (OP)]

In West Virginia There is a sequence of rocks. At the bottom you have  a thick layer of featureless sandstone. Shallow seas where oysters grew are next. I know this because I found fossil oysters in it. This is a black shale. It's pretty thick. AS you go higher you get sandstone again. Then you get coal. Usually 3 to 5 feet thick then you get more sandstone  it alternates between coal and sandstone.At the top is the tan mud that is everywhere on Earth apparently. What I can't find no matter how hard I look is fossil soil. It goes from 20 feet of sandstone to coal and there is nothing in between. It goes back and forth but there are no burrows or anything else that would tell you that the soil was ever there. Just sand. And there are zero fossil roots in the layers just before the coal. An instant change
 At the top of the mountain there are a few layers of fossil ferns, horsetails and cycads. They are several hundred feet above any coal or shale. They burst forth from the desolate featureless sand apparently from nowhere. No soil horizons.

Here in NC There is a few layers of grey mudstone with tiny bits of pumice in them. And many layers of welded tuff above it. If it was deep water How did the tuff get welded? I've looked hard for twenty years and the only things I've found that might be fossils were featureless blobs that might have been jelly fish. There's no ocean bed there. It goes from one to the other with nothing in between.  How?

And the tuff. Is it possible to determine it's source? There are a couple places that might have been volcanoes back then. Morrow Mountain being the lower plumbing of the roots of a volcano. It if was a few thousand feet above today's  level I don't see how it could have come from there.  There's another spot on business 52 where basalt is coming out of the ground in a way that looks a lot like the way Yellowstone is supposed to be plumbed. But again it would have been half a mile or more straight up to the actual volcano.  So where did it come from?

[OokieWonderslug (OP)]

Bueller? I know there are sites with fossil soil and burrows and the like. My question concerns Sandstone and Flat Top mountains in Raleigh County WV. And layers of the Carolina Slate Belt. How do you go from pure sand to a deep swamp back to deep sand back and forth some dozen times?
I see things and try to square them with what I have learned. My first mystery was charcoal 3 or more feet deep on every hillside my dad dug. I learned that is how mountains erode. Lightning sparks a fire, the tree roots wither, and then a landslide. Mystery solved.

Help me solve this one.

[OokieWonderslug (OP)]

Come on give me a little info here.

[evan_au]

Come on give me a little info here.

Sorry - I've never been to West Virginia; the nearest I have come is Washington DC, and I wasn't there to look at the geology...

May I suggest starting with this site: https://www.wvgs.wvnet.edu/www/geology/geology.htm