The Santa Fe Group is widely defined as basin-filling sedimentary and volcanic rocks of the Rio Grande rift. These range in age from late Oligocene to Pleistocene. The oldest formations in the group correspond to the earliest structural deformation associated with rifting. Geologic uplift of the region around the rift has ended deposition, and erosion in the Rio Grande river system has exposed many of the beds deposited earlier, often spectacularly, as in the badlands north of Santa Fe. The formations in the group are divided into lower and upper sections. The lower Santa Fe Group was deposited in bolsons where streams drained into intermittent playa lakes surrounded by piedmont deposits eroded from basin-margin uplifts. The upper Santa Fe Group was deposited in externally drained basins associated with the ancestral Rio Grande whose drainages flowed toward southern New Mexico. Some geologists also define a middle section transitional between the upper and lower sections.
visited San Ildefonso Pueblo with the Hayden Survey in 1873 and found fossil mammal bones characteristic of the Pliocene. Some of these were sent to Othniel Marsh. His bitter rival, Edward Drinker Cope, arrived at San Ildefonso the next year and collected a number of Miocene repile, bird, and mammal fossils. Childs Frick sent an expedition into the Tesuque area in 1924, and immediately recognized the paleontological potential of the Santa Fe beds. The Fricks Laboratory carried out field work through 1972. Work prior to 1940 was careless about identifying exact source strata, though greater care was taken thereafter. Most of the fossils came from the Pojoaque Member of the Tesuque Formation and were almost entire found within thin maroon-red to pale green claystone to fine-grained siltstone beds of lithosome B. These are interpreted as small lacustrine deposits. Fossils found in the Santa Fe Group include the canids Hemicyon and Carpocyon webbi, the antilocapridsCosoryx, Merycodus, and Ramoceros, chiroptera from the Vespertilionidae and Antrozoinae, the turtleGlyptemys valentinensis, and mastodonts.
gave the name "Santa Fe Marls" to the extensive sedimentary beds in the valley of the Rio Grande near Santa Fe during his 1869 survey of New Mexico and Colorado. He likened these to the badlands of South Dakota and correctly determined that they were upper Tertiary in age and were much younger than the Galisteo Formation beds which they overlie. He noted their great thickness, which he observed to be at least 1500 feet. By 1936, the Santa Fe Formation had been traced from central New Mexico into southern Colorado. Two years later, Bryan recognized that it extended at least from the San Luis Basin to beyond El Paso and was extensively faulted and deformed. He interpreted the formation as being deposited in a series of basins along an ancestral Rio Grande. The formation was promoted to group status in 1953 and defined by Baldwin three years later as basin-filling sedimentary and volcanic rocks of the Rio Grande rift. Galusha and Blick advocated a much narrower definition of the Santa Fe Group in 1971. They restricted it to the Tesuque Formation and Chamita Formation in the Espanola basin, and specifically excluded the older Abiquiu and Zia Formation and younger Ancha Formation. However, the broad 1956 definition by Baldwin has been widely accepted.
