Our featured specimen

​Maple (Acer sp.)
Yegua Formation; Eocene
College Station, Brazos County, Texas
** An especially long limb section with excellent woody fine structure, great exterior wood grain character, and a wonderful pattern on the polished face.  This fantastic limb section lies on its side for display -- OR stands up on it's cut and polished face.
​The community of College Station is growing rapidly with housing and commercial developments which have already foreclosed some of the collecting sites.  Now is the time to be acquiring fine specimens like this limb before all of the sites are built or paved over.
2.5” x 2” on polished face; limb section 8.5” long!    $79

​Tanoak in lahar (Lithocarpus sp.)
Mehama Volcanics Unit, Little Butte Formation, Oligocene
McQueen Ranch, Sweet Home area, Linn County, Oregon
**  A very unusual specimen with excellent wood anatomy preserved!  The McQueen Ranch was across the road from the former Marker Ranch (now called Holleywood Ranch) which produced some of the best-preserved wood in the Linn County Petrified Forest.  This stick of Tanoak was rolled into a thick blanket of volcanic lahar.  Lahar is a word originally derived from the Indonesian language in Java and it means a flowing, usually violent, mass of material ejected from a volcanic vent which combines with water and whatever soil and vegetation is in the area to create a hot mudflow concentrating in rivers or smaller stream channels.  If they have sufficient gradient, they can be exceptionally destructive.  Imagine a hot, viscous mudflow with the consistency of wet concrete and you can get an image of what a lahar would look like.  The difference between a lahar and a flow consisting of only pyroclastic material shows up on this specimen.  The lahar picks up anything in its way - either destroying it or taking it along for the ride.  In our specimen, the stick of Tanoak is being taken for a ride while the flow picks up small pebbles and bits of soil on its journey.  Notice in the photo that you can see just how angular all of those pebbles and bits are.  These small bits are definitely not river-tumbled with smooth surfaces.  This angularity is often some of the best evidence of a lahar flow.  The viscosity of the volcanic material in this particular flow made it possible to actually roll the stick into a larger cylinder before the entire mass cooled and was covered over by additional ash and mud.  It is not possible to determine the source of water that made the flowing mixture possible.  It could have been a heavy rainfall during the eruption, it could have been an existing stream, or it could have been a mass of snow which was immediately melted by the hot pyroclastic material.  Whatever it was, it did a fabulous job for the petrified wood collector in producing this exceptional specimen.  
​5” diameter on polished face; End cut up to 1” thick   $89

Ancient Conifer (Araucariaceae Family)
Morrison Formation, Upper Jurassic
McElmo Creek, Colorado
**  We love these limb sections which come with both the polished limb and the polished cut-off end!  The wood is well enough preserved to assure that it is part of the Araucariaceae Family.   We’ve included a photomicrograph above of the material.   If you have great Hermanophyton from McElmo Creek in your collection, here is an opportunity to add a really neat limb specimen of conifer that grew right alongside it!
1.75" diameter on both polished faces; 4" limb section, 7/8” thick end cut    $65

​​​Angiosperm Root   (Incertae sedis)
Tertiary
Chimney Creek, Nevada
** This is a fantastic display specimen!  It is a main root with numerous rootlets emanating from one side of its axis.  Most of the material recovered at Chimney Creek Reservoir is root, not stem, and this section is no exception.  This may well have been a rather shallow root.  The rootlet junctions are on one side only of the main axis indicating that the smooth side was close to the ground surface.  Growth habits of roots generally preclude sending rootlets in the direction of the sky, a phenomenon caused by both gravity and the relative difference between soil moisture above and below the main root axis.  What to look for in this specimen: there are at least a dozen rootlets emanating from this main root, giving it a spiky look and feel.  Some of the rootlets in this fine example protrude as much as an inch from the main root axis – a feature which should make it obvious to even the novice that there is something unique about this specimen, even if our photos don't show it all that well! This very attractive specimen has only minimal preservation of woody fine structure making it possible to see occasional vessels (making it an Angiosperm) but not enough to get a definitive identification.  
1.75" x 1" on the polished face, 6” long section   $75