US Dollar
Australian Dollar
Euro
CAD
Product Description
Eden Valley Petrified Wood Blue Forest Wyoming Polished Round
Lovely full round with iconic algae coating of Eden Valley Petrified Wood from the Blue Forest in northern Wyoming that has been slabbed, and polished on one face, natural rough everywhere else.
The polished face is 7 inches by 4.75 inches and it is 1 inch to 3.4 inches thick-so it sits at a nice slant for display.
This is Petrified Wood is Edenoxylon paviareolatum, an angiosperm in the Anacardiaceae family, commonly known as the cashew, pepper or sumac family.
It is from the Blue Forest deposit in Eden Valley, Wyoming, which was named for its blue chalcedony occurrence and this one has several great open pockets of botryoidal blue chalcedony!
It is found in the Green River Formation, and from the Eocene Epoch and about 50 million years old.
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 in many of the specimens.
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 the 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 Blue Forest petrified wood has been found with worm holes, insect borings, woodpecker holes, rare lichen fossils and small clam shells.
