FOOTNOTES
Note for Argentina: All of my Argentina material came out before the Argentine government fossil ban. Many of these are in my books Petrified Wood, published in 1998, and Ancient Forests, published in 2006. The golden gem cone appears five times in each copy of Petrified Wood. Since the full printing was 5,000 books, there are 25,000 images of the golden gem cone in libraries and homes around the world. I’ve given some specimens nicknames to honor and distinguish them.
Note for Arizona: I covered thousands of miles crisscrossing Arizona seeking petrified wood, again and again, year after year, rejecting ton after ton, buying and selling thousands of pounds, and this is the finest of what remains. Rare quality. Beautiful wood. There’s a reason Arizona wood is known all over the world.
Arizona: Historical note: The petrified forest was reportedly discovered in 1851 by a US Army expedition. It was about in the middle of nowhere, lost within a vast inhabitable desert. Vast quantities of colorful petrified wood sat out for the taking. It was heavy to move and not of great value, so prospectors mined the logs for amethyst, using dynamite. After decades of brouhahas about it in Washington, President Teddy Roosevelt declared it a National Monument in 1906. So seemingly inexhaustible was the quantity of petrified wood that the first park superintendent restricted visitors to taking forty pounds each. In the nearby town of Holbrook, walls and foundations were constructed using 200-million-year-old petrified logs. That said, the percentage of top grade collector specimen wood—rounds and limbs that are not severely fractured—is infinitesimal.
Note for Australia and Dr Tidwell: I made a lot of friends within the Australian rockhound and rock dealer (hunt rocks with a bulldozer) community over the years. Great people. Other than the US, it seems to me that Australia had the most active contingent of rockhounds during its prime rock-hunting years. Wood-wise, they were fortunate to have a broad variety of excellent silicified woods, ferns, and genera that exist nowhere else. Donponoxylon bennettii was named for two of my friends – John Bennett (Brit living in Australia) and Norman Donpon (recently passed away), both pioneers in the world of rock, and it was described and named by a man who was also a friend, esteemed paleobotanist Don Tidwell. Dr. Tidwell visited my collection when I was working on Petrified Wood and was most helpful with identifications. He bemoaned the lack of competent academics in the field capable of describing new species, stating matter-of-factly, there’re a lot more of you guys than there are of me. Those of us hunting petrified wood in the Morrison and Chinle exposures many years ago would often find one or more examples of a potentially new species and take it to Dr. Tidwell in his lab in Provo. He had time to study just a few. I have no doubt there are more conifers than just Araucaria in the Morrison formation. It’s an enormous stratigraphic layer that contains the record of ten million years of the earth’s natural history.
Sub-note: I know John Bennet quite well from decades of dealings. I once enjoyed a bowl of his excellent chicken curry in his trailer in Quartzite. He had earlier been a guest in my home in Colorado. I never met Norman Donpon in person. We communicated in the old-fashioned way: by handwritten letters sent via mail. I never made it to Australia. I tried once but they wouldn’t let me in. That was 1974.
Ikitsy Pink footnote: The first specimens are from Ikitsy. I met a mineral dealer from Madagascar at the Denver Show in the late 90s. I was in the wholesale jewelry section looking for a present for Martelle, where I walked by a table with mostly rough cutting material and a few small pieces of pink and red polished petrified wood. I arranged with the dealer to import a quantity of the material based on the samples. I told him I would accept only top quality full round pieces with no glue or significant fracturing. He brought me about 500 pieces, delivered to Tucson the following winter. I rejected 85% due to fracturing and glue. Of course, I had to re-polish every piece. Examples appear on pages 126-132 of Ancient Forests with some micro images on page 32. Some are all pink; others also have red or light gray/blue and/or white. It has unique patterns, especially interesting under low power magnification. It also has a nice exterior, including often twisted and interesting root or vine morphology. Since there are small pockets of well-preserved cells, it is not cast material. As I have not seen any knots, and from the description of the collecting area, I believe it is all or mostly all root or vine material. It takes a great polish.
Goldfield, Nevada. This was the first really great log I ever owned. I got it in a trade with an old-timer rockhound in the 1980s. He got it in the 50s or 60s. The story was that an unknown person was passing through Grand Junction with a pickup load of this wood, and he needed money for gas and food. Back in those days, Grand Junction was hopping due to uranium (they used tailings for fill dirt and concrete) and was the first larger town you’d reach driving east once you departed vast stretches of uninhabited landscape, and we had a rock shop in the Yellow Pages. So anyway, this mysterious fellow sold a bunch of nice limbs to the shop owner, and my friend happened to walk in shortly thereafter and about did a flip when he saw these perfect, colorful limbs. He bought them all, which is why I was able to get one in a trade. It wasn’t his best one. Between visiting every rock shop in the West and hiking hundreds of miles on the Colorado Plateau in search of fossil wood, I knew how rare it was to find attractive, colorful limbs without fractures such as this. My friend told me it was from Oregon, so I didn’t question that until I learned better.
Note on use of term full round for Utah specimens. Because actual full round specimens are as scarce as hens’ teeth in places like the Henry Mountains and other Morrison exposures, the term full round was used for specimens that did not include the original fullness of the tree from which it evolved. Many are hunks of a far larger tree that had eroded from the forces of nature. It must have a natural exterior all around. Preserved cambium layer is extremely rare. I have heard collectors brag that they only collect “full rounds”, which is a mistake in my opinion. A customer once rejected a beautiful round of Argentina wood because a tiny portion of the exterior was missing. It was all natural and weathered. Hey … it’s 150 million years old. Lighten up. A collector who rejects wood that isn’t an actual full round is missing out on many beautiful and interesting petrified wood specimens, such as some of these Utah beauties.
Utah full round aka specimen round. Remember first that the term evolved among the collectors who sprouted like mushrooms after a warm late summer rain in Utah, beginning in the 1950s and for about fifty years thereafter, before all the rocks had been found. Meanwhile, the same sort of phenomenon took hold at the same time in the Pacific Northwest, and those rockhounds came up with their own terminology. When the PNW collectors called a piece a full round, they meant pretty much the full log with a center and growth rings. That was because there were lots and lots of full logs for them to choose from in many disparate locations. Meanwhile, down in the oven-like Utah desert, rockhounds are jeeping all over the place and only very rarely finding an actual full log that was any good. But some of the specimens they found were like this one – nice all around with a lovely natural patina and astounding colors. It’s clear that all 360 degrees of the exterior diameter have spent millennia bathing in the winds and sands of the Henry Mountain laccolith aftermath, sanding themselves into objects of art … of wonder, as if magically.
Note for Zimbabwe wood and Woodworthia in general. When I began looking for petrified wood beyond my collecting areas in Colorado and Utah, I turned to the most famous wood locality in the world: Northern Arizona. If you haven’t been to Petrified Forest National Park, you should go. Early on in my Arizona-wood learning curve, I learned that most of the wood from Northern Arizona is Araucaria, but some is Woodworthia and less is Schilderia. I’d seen a few really nice Woodworthia specimens, but they were quite scarce, and small limbs were hard to find. Note: I have found Woodworthia in the Chinle formation in Utah, but it’s usually not much to write home about.
Years later, the first petrified wood from Zimbabwe made its way to the Arizona shows. The wood wasn’t that great, but it included some standout Woodworthia sticks that were long and had attractive, well-preserved, dimpled exteriors. I’d never seen such well-preserved Woodworthia surface detail. The wood was exciting, but it did not take much of a polish – the best anyone could get was a boring dull greenish-brown finish. Then one year in Quartzsite I came upon a new vendor booth – a couple from Zimbabwe who’d been forced out by the Mugabe government, having had their lands and hotels seized. They escaped with some belongs, including a decent quantity of petrified wood like the world had never before seen – solid specimens of Woodworthia and Araucaria with world-class preservation and stunning colors. I bought all their best pieces. In 2008, a Tucson vendor from Zimbabwe offered for sale the amazing African Well Log. The finest chromium green wood in the world is found in two places – Northern Arizona and Zimbabwe – both in very limited locations. If you look at a map of the world as it existed 220 million years ago during the Triassic, you’ll see that these places were not all that far apart.
Utah – The Talk of the Show: I got this from a Moab dealer at Cloud’s at Quartzsite about a quarter century ago. It was a hot dry, dusty day. The show had just begun. I was on my way to get some curly fries and stopped by a dealer’s table and attempted to restrain my lust for this log, which then was in two pieces, polished on one end, and about a foot long. I looked it over with feigned nonchalance and asked a few questions, before inquiring about the price. He told me the price, adding: “It’s the talk of the show, you know.” I turned and walked away in the direction of the curly fries, the aroma of burning peanut oil luring me away, but after fifty feet, I turned back and made my counteroffer. He declined, so I agreed to his price. I had to have it.
Utah footnote: Ernie’s Rock Shop: One hot day about thirty years ago, I went to Ernie Shirley’s Rock Shop, while passing through Hanksville on a rock hunting trip. No one else was around, just old Blue, Ernie’s eternally ancient, blind, blue healer. Hey Ernie, I asked, Okay if I look around in these boxes back here? I was in a three-sided-room, off the pass-through garage in Ernie’s ancient, ramshackle, formerly agricultural, rock-shop compound. Piles of rocks everywhere. Sure, he fired back, to my delight. Sweating like a laborer on the equator at high noon on an equinox, I spent a dusty hour or two inspecting every nook and cranny. I knew Ernie’s been there a long time – since right after The War – and that he had the best local wood back in the day. He still came up with good stuff at times. What’s that? I thought, desperate for a drink of water but afraid Ernie wouldn’t let me back in if I left. I eyeballed a cobwebby, caved-in, cardboard box that was jammed between the wall and the back of a lower shelf, invisible from all but the most exacting scrutiny. I shimmied it out. The old cardboard was water-stained and fragile, with the aroma of mouse urine, so I had to be careful. I put it on the floor, folded back the top flaps, and wondered if these somewhat cylindrical items wrapped in newspaper dated in the 1950s, might be my sought-after quarry. I forget how many there were. At least eight limbs, each uncut and natural. Beautiful, perfect, with undeniably Escalante characteristics, a rare find. Each seemed more amazing than the previous. By then I’d had enough experience cutting and polishing to know good wood when I saw it, and I knew those were super good. When I brough them to Ernie to ask the price, he said: Well, you weren’t supposed to find those, but he let me have them at a very reasonable price, none-the-less, as if I’d won the right fair and square by breathing mouse feces for a few hours.
Photography and lighting
Images are captured with Pentax 35 mm DSLR cameras and Pentax all-glass 50 and 100 mm macro lenses. Lighting is daylight balanced LED. My goal is to capture what the specimen actually looks like under proper display lighting, which ideally equals sunlight. In decades past I used actual sunlight by chasing it from window to window, but modern lights are far easier to use and are approximately equivalent in color values. I corrected each image as close as possible to appear as it looks under direct sunlight. I often move lights to decrease glare and otherwise improve images. My display cases use 50 watt tungsten daylight bulbs. To fully appreciate each specimen, there is no substitute to sitting down in a comfortable chair with good light and plenty of time, holding it in your hand, turning it in the light, examining it from every angle, realizing its heft and its energy. It took me 35 years to put this set together. And as an experienced collector, I came into collecting fossil woods with a degree of understanding that which aided me substantially while forming this collection, basically that perfect is best.
Glue Note: When I was working on Ancient Forests, I sought out amazing collections to photograph. I learned that the geology department at Washington State University in Pullman housed an enormous petrified wood collection, so I arranged to visit and to photograph (see the best images in Ancient Forests.) Most of the old-time collector pieces in the collection were thick, large, full rounds of fabulous quality wood – some of the finest ever found, including the best quality large Swartz Canyon slices I have seen. The collector was active in the 1950s and later and amassed the best wood from all over the Northwest. Here’s the sad part: most of the specimens were cut but not polished – instead of polish, they were coated with thick originally transparent resin, like the tabletop in a 1970s hip diner. The resin was old and yellowed and cracking and curling up on the edges. I didn’t photograph those. The cost to have the glue removed and to polish these pieces the proper way would be astronomical as well as an environmental mess. This is not the only time I’ve seen this issue.
END FOOTNOTES