Everything About Petrified Wood

hello everybody I'm Lonnie with everything nature today we're going to talk about one of my favorite fossils and I've got a lot to show you so stick around imagine if you will what happens if a tree falls in the forest well first off yes it does make a sound it makes a lot of sound secondly the tree is now dead and like all dead things it will start to Decay it may dry out or get rained on and then start to rot away insects May attack it and start eating it and living there and then a bigger animal may come and tear it up looking for insects to eat now imagine we millions of years in the past even hundreds of millions a tree falls and dies and now it's buried in either mud or maybe a flood comes and just covers the thing up cuts it off from oxygen if this happens it's not going to rot it won't slowly Decay and disappear it's just going to stay there so what's going to happen to this tree that's buried and is not going to rot away while being buried in mud or sediment the wood of the tree is slowly bit by bit being replaced by the dissolved minerals in the water if it stays in place and not exposed to any air the wood will eventually be completely replaced by minerals resulting in petrified wood sometimes even the minute details of the tree can be preserved things like KN holes the wood grain uh twigs and even bark like I said this is one of my favorite fossils and it's so much fun to collect because there's so much variety every single piece is different depending on the species of the tree and the minerals that were present when it was being fossilized you get all sorts of different shapes patterns and even colors it's really really pretty cool so I'm going to show you a few different pieces of petrified wood so that you can enjoy and appreciate this really amazing fossil so let's take a look now this piece is some of the most colorful petrified wood that you're going to be able to find it comes from Arizona and it's mostly silica base so you can actually sometimes find little tiny bits of quartz crystal in there all these different colors come from Trace minerals blended into that mix things like iron and magnesium carbon and chromium the trees in Arizona at that time which was about 200 million years ago were mostly tropical coniferous trees so they often don't have the growth rings that you see in decidious trees because those are caused when there are growing Seasons like winter spring and summer that this is a really beautifully detailed piece of petrified Oak now unlike the previous piece that is from Arizona that's a coniferous tree Oaks are decidious meaning they have a growing season and this one you can definitely see the growth rings I love it because you can see the bark even and it's just really almost perfectly preserved now here we have a really lovely piece of opalized gko wood you can see the wood grain very nicely on the outside but on the inside is very pretty creamy opal now it doesn't have any of the color flashes that you usually associate with opal in this case it's what we refer to as common opal because it doesn't have that color now this is a really fun one this one's called Peanut wood it comes from Australia and I'll tell you a secret it's not from a peanut tree peanuts don't grow on trees they grow underground these white spots that are shaped kind of like peanuts those are tunnels of a very small type of clam that burrows into the wood to hide from predators the tunnels are filled in with sediment as the wood petrifies and it leaves these cool little white spots behind well I've given you just a small sample of some of the really amazing different types of petrified wood that you can find so hopefully this will inspire you to go and explore and find out about the rest of this amazing family of fossils I hope you enjoyed it and we will see you next time on everything nature if you love learning about cool natury things you should like this video you can subscribe to us on YouTube and you can even check us out on Facebook thank you very much hey

Channel: Everything Nature

Views: 232,881

Keywords: Petrified Wood, Intro, Rocks, Fossil (Collection Category), Geology (Field Of Study)

Id: GSRFN-hqqvU

Length: 4min 43sec (283 seconds)

Published: Sat May 30 2015