The Rabbit Hill Limestone has its type section at the junction of Whiterock and Copenhagen Canyon in the northern Monitor Range (Merriam, 1963). At the type locality, the Rabbit Hill is strongly deformed under the sole of a thrust fault and is probably internally thrusted as well as being complexly folded.

The Rabbit Hill Limestone is Early Devonian (Lochkovian to Praghian) in age based upon brachiopods, trilobites, corals and conodonts (Merriam, 1973). The upper Rabbit Hill is equivalent to the upper Masket Shale and Wenban Limestone. It is also in part correlative with the McColley Canyon Formation which is equivalent to the lower portion of the Nevada Group (Beacon Peak Dolomite). The Rabbit Hill is also equivalent of the uppermost Lone Mountain Dolomite. At Coal Canyon in the northern Simpson Park Mountains, the Rabbit Hill overlies Windmill Limestone and underlies the McColley Canyon Formation (Johnson, 1965).

The upper contact of the formation at Dobbin Summit in the Monitor Range appears to be a low-angle fault marked by a discontinuous jasperoid ledge (Kleinhampl and Ziony, 1985). Merriam (1973) called this contact an unconformity in the Monitor Range, with the Lone Mountain Dolomite missing and the overlying Roberts Mountains Formation thinned considerably. The formation conformably overlies the Silurian Roberts Mountains Formation in both the Simpson Park Mountains and Monitor Range.

The Rabbit Hill is composed of dark grey to black, fine-grained, platy and argillaceous limestone and calcareous shale, and interbedded coarse crystalline limestones. Crinoids, corals, and brachiopod hash are locally abundant (Merriam, 1960). Matti and others (1975), have divided the formation into an upper and lower member. The lower member is very fine-grained, dark grey to brown-grey, thinly bedded and laminated, allodapic lime mudstone, wackestone, and calcareous shale with 1-15 cm thick layers of black laminated chert. Minor thin and medium-bedded, graded and massive, allodapic limestones are also present.

The upper member is conspicuously folded and contorted by intraformational deformation. Folds vary from simple flexural slip to tight, recumbent or overturned forms (Matti and others, 1975). These folds exhibit random axial orientations and are often bounded by nondisturbed upper and lower beds indicating a probable origin by gravity slumping downslope.

At Dobbin Summit in the Monitor Range, the formation is a highly fossiliferous gray limestone with small to large percentages of coarse quartz silt and sand which cause the unit to weather a distinctive reddish to orange-brown (Kleinhampl and Ziony, 1985). Wise (1977) described a lower member at Dobbin Summit composed of about 200 feet of very fine-grained, yellowish-gray, lime mudstone interbedded with dark to medium gray, lime wackestone and packstones with an abundant shelly fauna, and thin beds of laminated black chert. The upper member is about 120 feet of interbedded lime wackestone with about 10 to 15 percent fossil fragments and packstone with about 40 percent fossil fragments, both of which contain about 15 percent ovoid pellets and less than 1 percent very fine quartz sand. The upper 30 feet of the unit is soley lime packstone. Fossils include brachiopods, tabulate and horn corals, gastropods, crinoid and trilobite fragments, sponges, nautiloids, and fenestrate bryozoans (Wise, 1977).

In the Schroeder Mountain area, west of the southern Tuscarora Mountains, Devonian limestones overlying the Roberts Mountains Formation have been correlated with the Rabbit Hill and represent the northernmost exposures (Cress, 1972). The Rabbit Hill is composed of folded and altered, light to medium-gray, yellowish-brown weathering, massive and fossiliferous micrite which is locally cross-bedded where silty. Corals, brachiopods, and graptolites are abundant in the formation (Cress, 1972).

The Rabbit Hill is about 250 feet thick in a structurally complicated exposure at the type locality (Merriam, 1963), about 320 feet near Dobbin Summit in the Monitor Range (Wise, 1977), about 380 feet at Schroeder Mountain east of the southern Tuscarora Mountains (Cress, 1972), and 1,100 feet at Coal Canyon in the Simpson Park Mountains (Merriam, 1973).

The Rabbit Hill Limestone has been described within the Monitor and Toquima Ranges and in the Simpson Park and Tuscarora Mountains (Schroeder Mountain area).

The lower laminated limestones of the Rabbit Hill Limestone have been interpreted as quiet water basinal limestones deposited with very low sedimentation rates under anoxic conditions along the outer shelf, identical to the Roberts Mountains Formation (Matti and McKee, 1977). Both formations formed within a north-northwest-trending transitional facies belt about 100 miles wide with dolomites on the east and siliceous rocks to the west (Kleinhampl and Ziony, 1985). The upper member of the Rabbit Hill has been assigned to a medium- and thick-bedded lime mudrock facies by Matti and McKee (1977) and interpreted as a proximal turbidite deposited on the slope. Thick allodapic sands and abundant soft sediment slumps are present in the lower Rabbit Hill (Matti and others, 1974).