Explain what sedimentary rocks can tell us about the geological history of a particular place? use 5 examples?

Question

Explain how numerical age dating works and what kind of information is given by a rock?

Answer 1

Question 1.
Example 1-Navajo Sandstone Formation, Jurassic, covers large areas of the Colorado Plateau-including Zion National Park). The most characteristic feature of this formation is that it has thick deposits of well-sorted quartz sandstone with big cross beds(sedimentary structures)--indicating that the sand was deposited by wind as dunes, in a giant sand sea (think Sahara).
http://www.agiweb.org/geotimes/nov03/NN_navajo.htm
Example 2:
Radiolarian chert of the Franciscan Complex, California. Jurassic and Cretaceous. Good outcrops in the Marin Headlands, north side of Golden Gate bridge, in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Thinly bedded maroon to pale green alternating layers of chert and siliceous mudstone. The chert is chock-full of pin-head size radiolarian fossils--radiolarians are open-ocean marine plankton--but has no shallow marine fossils or calcareous plankton These sediments were deposited in deep water in the open ocean. Since they sit on basalt, it has been inferred that they were deposited on ocean crust.
Example 3:
Fossiliferous Permian limestone, Texas, Capitan Reef in Guadalupe Mountains National Park
"Over millions of years, calcareous sponges and algae combined with other lime-secreting marine organisms and vast quantities of lime that precipitated directly from the seawater to form the 400-mile-long, horseshoe-shaped Capitan Reef." --http://www2.nature.nps.gov/geology/parks/gumo/
Compare to warm, shallow Great Barrier Reef of Australia.
Example 4:
Cretaceous Cedar Mountain Formation in Dinosaur National Park. A 2002 study of rocks types, textures, and sedimentary features lead a group of researchers to conclude that the paleoenvironment was generally arid to semi-arid terrestrial with occasional flashy, extreme rainfall events.
http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2002AM/finalprogram/abstract_46144.htm
Example 5:
Moraine deposits all over the Great Lakes area are evidence for continental glaciers during the Ice Ages.

Question 2:
Numerical Age dating
http://www.gpc.edu/~pgore/geology/geo102/radio.htm
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/radiometric.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating
Question 3:
As for "what kind of information is given by a rock?" --partly answered here already. A rock may give information useful for determing one or more of the following: Age, tectonic setting and history of formation, paleoenvironment, climate information, biological history of life info (if fossiliferous), paleolatitude, etc.

Answer 2

Im greater fascinated as to why if there became right into a flood can we hit upon fossils contained in the order evolution and radiometric relationship predicts and not in a random order. as an occasion, we in no way hit upon a mammal below a dinosaur, we in no way hit upon a hominid in older strata than a dinosaur. Why arent they in a completely random order?