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Product Description
Petrified Wood Polished Limb Bruneau Woodpile Idaho
Lovely, polished on one end, limb or branch of Petrified Wood found in the Bruneau Woodpile, Owyhee County, Idaho and within the Chalk Hills Formation.
The Petrified Wood limb is 2.58 inches by 1.58 inch and .9 of an inch thick.
It is very opalized and has some natural fractures.
This piece has is a very cool natural rough "bark" on the edges and is rough 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.
Petrified Wood found at the Bruneau Woodpile is different from most famous deposits in its mineralization and its abundance of specimens exhibiting a surprising diversity of species. Bruneau Petrified Wood is described as being mineralized primarily as a Carbonate-rich Apatite. The huge variety of both conifers and hardwoods is representative of the warm temperate forests that flourished in southwest Idaho during the late Miocene. Though large specimens aren't found here, limbs and wood fragments are preserved in a single thin sandstone bed and appear to represent woody debris that was transported by streams, possibly to a catastrophic event (most likely a storm).
The Bruneau Woodpile is still open for rockhounds.
This petrified wood piece is from the Kirkby collection and was self-collected sometime in the 1930's to the 1960's.
