A history of petrified wood

Petrified

wood

Let’s turn back the hands of time a little…

Imagine our planet 200 millions of years ago !

Forest

Era of the first dinosaurs : reptiles looking like crocodiles, fish eating oversize amphibians, and small dinosaurs living amid various species of ferns, cycas and other plants and primitive animals.

Era of the first conifers , for at that age , leafy trees don’t exist yet : only when the reign of ferns is over do the first trees appear, conifers amongst which ginkgo biloba (the tree with a thousand shields) and araucaria (monkeys’ despair) have survived up to this 21 st century.

Gigantic forests are drowned by flooding rivers. On the one side, the bark, branches and roots have been torn to shred; on the other side, the trunks’ wood, drowned in the bottom of deep lakes, hasn’t decayed. At that very same time, volcanoes in a nearby area erupt, vomiting ashes (not lava) tens of meters thick, covering the drowned trunks with a protective mantle.

This mud, made of ashes and water and minerals, contains the chemical ingredients which will slowly replace the wood, one molecule at a time: silica. The pressure exerted by over a hundred meter thick layer of matter above the trunks generates enough heat to favour crystallization of silica into quartz.

Petrified wood field

That was 200 millions of years ago, The Alps are 100 old, Mankind... 3.

www.trade-oracio.com - Petrified wood from Madagascar

Galerie photos