Zookeeper Fossils: Animations: the good, the bad, and the naughty

I'm not name dropping

as that would be a violation of my ex-sister-in-law's privacy

but I have been mentioning that she is a geologist in the hopes of getting a little

street-cred-by-association in the fossil world.

I'll take it any way I can get it!

The main benefit of our relationship, besides getting to associate with a wonderful, intelligent person, is that she willingly answers every inane question I think of while playing Candy Crush at 1AM.

"How long does it take a fossil to form?"

"What is an agate?"

"Why is coal black?"

...ad naseum...

My latest fixation is petrified wood so I asked her for a link to a good teaching animation illustrating the process of petrification. My own Google searches had exposed me to some fairly horrifying results including Japanese anime and porn.

Her links were better but by no means fool-proof.

The absolute best of the bunch had a high production value with a fabulous animation sequence but at the end of the video the announcer declared that all animals alive today are exactly the same as they were millions of years ago. That statement and the Arabic lettering at the end of the video sounded my warning bells so I researched the producer and found out that he is a proponent of Islamic creationism.

Heavy sigh...

My geologist ex-sis-n-law stated it best when she said,

"I hate it when science gets highjacked."

So just enjoy the amazing beauty of this piece of petrified wood I found in northern Arizona and be satisfied with dry texts describing its formation...

Including the following dry text that I pieced together to describe the formation of

Eden Valley petrified wood from Wyoming:

I was recently looking through my fossil cabinet and it caused me to ponder the human compulsion to “collect.” Collecting may harken back to a primitive time in human history when food and tools weren’t found at WalMart, and the definition of “collecting” is usually followed by the definition of “hoarding”, but if I had to add a new sub-collection to my existing fossil hoard, it would definitely be petrified wood.

Petrified wood is a fossil, meaning that the substance of the living material, over time, is replaced by minerals and turned to stone. The wood has to be covered by volcanic ash, mud flows, sediments in lakes, etc., for this process to take place and then, for us to be able to find it, the surrounding materials must be disturbed in some way, such as earthquakes, erosion, glaciation, etc. which exposes the now fossilized wood.

Arguably the most unique petrified wood in the world is found in the Eden Valley area of Wyoming and dates to the Eocene Epoch, about 50 million years ago. Vickie and Jim Manderfield, of the Great Western Fossil Adventure, recently traveled to Eden Valley in search of this fossil treasure.

The photo above and below are of their finds.

There are 2 factors that make Eden Valley petrified wood so unusual. The first is that the trees grew in an area of shallow, algae filled lakes creating an environment where this particular petrification process began while the trees were either still alive or immediately after they died. The second factor is the algae itself which formed a thick coating around the wood, creating a perfect cast of the living tree. The trees eventually died, shrinking within their algae casts, leaving spaces that were slowly filled in with silica rich water solutions creating beautiful layers of white to blue-tinged chalcedony with occasional golden calcite inclusions. The wood itself has a gray to black color and retains every tiny detail of its living form.

Finding EV wood requires more work than just getting to the hunting grounds in west- central Wyoming. The target area is 80 miles wide and the wood is 12-18” under the surface of the soil. The best hunting strategy for someone with time constraints is to seek out the shallow pits of other hunters and continue their work.

While it is possible to find fossilized wood in Florida, it can also be found in many other states and the following link is to a web page that provides an excellent basic outline for the history of petrified wood in the United States: http://andy321.proboards.com/thread/ 64569/petrified-wood

Feel free to use it as a vacation planner to start your own petrified wood collection.

More success with the saw

I finally worked up the courage to slice the only whole septarian nodule that I brought back from Utah. These nodules are surprisingly fragile and I broke the others at the hunting site to ensure that they weren't simple mud balls. A broken nodule, however, is not a tragedy, as the rough side can be polished to amazing effect.

The above photo is my whole nodule, loaded and ready to go.

TA DA!!!