This is a piece of petrified forest floor!

It is from the Kirkby collection and it was self-collected sometime in the 1930's to the 1960's.

On the back a handwritten note says:

“6472-Tsuga sp. Hemlock

Limb, fragments of leaves, seeds, and twigs as strewn under the tree in the debris of a forest floor. Forest Buried between lava flows in Ellensburg Canyon, Miocene, Washington.   Kirkby”

Approximately 17.5 million years ago during the middle of the Miocene epoch, a series of large volcanic eruptions began in the eastern part of the Columbia River Plateau, near the present-day borders of Washington, Oregon and Idaho. When conditions were right, some of these forests and swamps were buried by subsequent flows and the trees were preserved by silica dissolved from volcanic ash and the basalts. This happened several times during the 10 million years of volcanic eruptions, resulting in numerous deposits of fossilized wood across the Columbia Plateau.

This is an example of the forest floor, littered with twigs, seeds, and cones, that actually was buried in these lava flows and “petrified” or “mineralized” into stone.

Tsuga sp. refers to a genus of coniferous trees commonly known as hemlocks.

Hemlock trees are a species of large evergreen trees native to North America and Asia. Hemlock trees are identified by their conical shape, flat, aromatic needle-like leaves, small oval or cylindrical seed-bearing cones, and reddish-brown bark.  Evergreen hemlock trees belong to the pine family Pinaceae.

Although botanical names are usually derived from Latin, the name tsuga is actually the Japanese name for hemlock, referring more specifically to southern Japanese hemlock (Tsuga sieboldii).

The name "hemlock" arose from a perceived similarity in the smell of its crushed foliage to that of the unrelated actual plant hemlock.  But unlike the plant, Tsuga species trees are not poisonous.