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Product Description
Petrified Wood Polished Limb Cast Eden Valley Wyoming
Lovely, polished on one end, limb or branch of Petrified Wood found in Eden Valley, Wyoming.
The highly agatized Petrified Wood limb is 1.79 inches long by 1.78 inches and 2.34 inches long.
This piece is natural rough on the edges, with one side that is not complete (partly broken away).
The bottom is rough, but the piece still stands up and the polished edge is at a slant for great display!
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.
This petrified wood is often found with a layer of fossilized algae. 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. 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.
This petrified wood piece is from the Kirkby collection and was self-collected sometime in the 1930's to the 1960's.
