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Product Description
Petrified Wood Polished Limb Eden Valley Wyoming
Lovely, polished on one end, limb or branch of Petrified Wood found in Eden Valley, Wyoming.
The Petrified Wood limb is 1.7 inches long by 1.6 inches and 2 inches long.
It does stand on its own at a slant for great display.
This limb has been lightened in the last picture to show detail.
It is polished on top, natural rough on the edges and on the bottom.
Petrified Wood formed when a tree died and was quickly buried by sediments. Minerals in the groundwater then permeated the wood, replacing the original organic matter and turning it to stone. The main mineral is silica, but trace elements in the silica create a variety of colors.
Eden Valley Petrified Wood 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.
This is Petrified Wood is found in the Green River Formation, and from the Eocene Epoch and about 50 million years old.
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.
This petrified wood piece is from the Kirkby collection and was self-collected sometime in the 1930's to the 1960's.
