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Product Description
Eden Valley Petrified Wood Blue Forest Wyoming Polished Limb
Lovely full round or limb cast of Eden Valley Petrified Wood from northern the Blue Forest in Wyoming that has been slabbed, and polished on one face, natural rough everywhere else.
It is 2.5 inches by 2 inches and 2.9 inches long.
This is Petrified Wood (Schinoxylon) from the famous "Blue Forest" in Eden Valley, Wyoming.
Eden Valley Petrified Wood, which is found near, and named after, the town of Eden, located in the western central part of Wyoming. The 80-mile-long area includes three major collecting areas: the Blue Forest, Big Sandy Reservoir, and Oregon Buttes.
The Blue Forest collecting areas are located near the west end of Eden Valley and about 30 miles west of Farson. The fossil wood found in this area is well known for the light blue agate that can be associated with many of the specimens.
Eden Valley Petrified Wood formed when the original trees and branches were rapidly buried under sediment and were initially preserved due to a lack of oxygen.
The Blue Forest Petrified Wood is the most unique and beautiful of all the Eden Valley petrified wood types because of its color and its algae coating. Parts of Lake Gosiute were shallow and supported thick layers of algae that created the Blue Forest Petrified Wood. The driftwood and trees in these shallow water areas became coated with this algae, and as the water began to evaporate and dry, calcium mixed with the algae to form a hard but porous coating on the wood. As the algae dried it shrank away from the wood, leaving a space that was later filled with minerals. It is thought that the element Tin, caused specimens of Blue Forest petrified wood to exhibit blue crystalline quartz or microcrystalline chalcedony. As the wood decayed, the wood was replaced by silica and calcite leaving petrified replicas of the original piece of wood. As the minerals coated the inside surface of the algae cast, perfect impressions of the outer surface of the wood were duplicated and preserved features not found in fossil wood anywhere else in the world. Some specimens of Blue Forest petrified wood have been found that preserve worm holes, insect borings, woodpecker holes, rare lichen fossils and small clam shells.
