Petrified Wood © 2008 Bo Mackison

My way of thinking, this is a lot of money for an old (thought, granted, very old) piece of tree. Someone must buy the stuff, or they wouldn’t have such big piles of it. The ranger at the entrance to the Petrified Forest National Park did say that the people from Jim Gray’s Petrified Wood Company in Holbrook, Arizona ran a reputable shop–unlike some nearby store keepers who illegally remove the rocks from the park to sell.

Petrified Logs in Petrified Forest National Park © 2008 Bo Mackison

So how much would one of these logs cost if they were for sale? Well, we’ll never know, because they aren’t available for purchase. They are located in the National Park.

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In response to a Marcie’s question in the comments below, here are some facts about petrified wood that you might not know:

Petrified wood is permineralized wood (as in permanently mineralized) and it is a fossil from a family of trees now extinct in the Northern Hemisphere. The trees are still found in a very few places in the Southern Hemisphere. During the Late Triassic Period – 248 to 206 million years ago – this Arizona desert region was tropical. During seasonal flooding, trees were swept into sandy river channels, and then periodically buried by layers of gravelly sand and volcanic ash.

The ash, which is a source of silica, permineralized the buried wood, replacing the wood with silica. Red iron oxide and pink manganese deposits added coloring in the fossil. Voila!

Petrified wood, of course, didn’t occur overnight. The ocean receded over 60 million years ago, and the wood gradually turned into mineral fossils. Awesome stuff, this geology.