How To Identify Petrified Wood

Petrified wood from the Latin root petro meaning rock or stone.

How to identify petrified wood. The trees turned to rock or became petrified. And not all fossil organisms are petrified. If high levels of magnification are necessary thin slices of wood only a few cells thick are used.

That being that there is actually no wood left in the piece. Petrified wood forms when trees that die millions of years ago fell and became covered in mud sand and water. Not a botanist so when I referred to my ancient copies of Gems Mineral magazines from March to August of 1960 and read Virginia Pages How to Identify Fossil Wood I got lost in a hurry.

The first step is to select a specimen. The specimens that will be easiest to give a preliminary examination. Some pieces of wood lose so much of their original cell structure during the petrifying process that it is impossible to recover enough information to identify them.

I was asked to identify these pieces of possible petrified wood--theyre pretty worn and smoothed but theres definitely some sort of remaining pattern that does look like possible petrified wood. It can also be very rewarding. For example petrified wood may be replaced with chalcedony or shells replaced with pyrite.

Overview of Fossil Wood ID Part 1 Softwoods and Hardwoods Part 1 covers basic wood anatomy terms that are needed when looking at fossil wood specimens. Literally wood turned into stone is the name given to a special type of fossilized remains of terrestrial vegetationPetrifaction is the result of a tree or tree-like plants having been replaced by stone via a mineralization process that often includes permineralization and replacement. Green or blue shades usually come from cobalt copper or chromium.

The petrified wood that is easiest to identify has smooth curvy sections that are often a brownish bark color. When a fossil organism is subjected to mineral replacement it is said to be petrified. This means that out of all fossils only the creature itself could be fossilized by petrification.