The Wenban Limestone was named by Gilluly and Masursky (1965) for Devonian limestones best exposed on the western flank of Wenban Peak south of the town of Cortez, Nevada. The section here is "considerably tectonically disturbed" and Gilluly and Masursky (1965) opted for measuring a section on the west side of Cortez Canyon, Sec. 2, T. 26 N., R. 47 E.

The Wenban Limestone is Early Devonian in age. It is equivalent to part of the Nevada Group. In the Cortez Mountains the Wenban conformably and gradationally overlies the Roberts Mountains Formation (Stewart and McKee, 1977).

In the Cortez Mountains, the Wenban is composed of a lower unit about 2,500 feet thick, composed of thick-bedded grey limestone interbedded with grey to yellowish argillaceous limestone. The upper unit is about 500 feet of dense, thin to thick-bedded, very fine-grained gray bioclastic limestone. The Wenban becomes lighter, finer grained, and more massive upwards (Gilluly and Masursky, 1965) with a rich fauna of brachiopods, corals, trilobites, ostracodes, crinoids, bryozoans and tentaculitids.

Strata tentatively assigned to the Wenban Limestone occur in the Gold Acres window of the Shoshone Range. Although highly faulted, these rocks are lithologically very similar to the Wenban in the Cortez area (Stewart and McKee, 1977).

Devonian limestones which may be equivalent to the Wenban also occur in the Tuscarora Mountains where they have been referred to informally as the Popovich Formation (Hardie, 1966). A partial section of these rocks consists of a lower thick-bedded, clastic limestone with lenses of edgewise conglomerate and sandy limestone about 450 feet thick, a middle shaly limestone about 500 feet thick, and an upper thick-bedded grey limestone 550 feet in thickness (Roen, 1961).

The Wenban is about 2,000 feet thick at the measured section in Cortez Canyon (Gilluly and Masursky, 1965).

The Wenban is recognized in the Simpson Park and Cortez Mountains, and Shoshone Range.

The lower Wenban Limestone contains even laminations indicative of slow, low-energy deposition in a deep-water basinal setting (Matti and McKee, 1977). Interbedded lime mudrock and skeletal limestones in the lower portion of the Wenban Limestone have been interpreted as gravity-flow deposits which accumulated by turbidity-current, debris flow, or grain-flow processes (Matti and McKee, 1977).