Mark's Petrified Wood

Rainbow Petrified Wood

Why the great  colors?

The most obvious answer is: It's due to where they lived and toppled.

The colors in New Mexico and Arizona Petrified Wood are totally unique to this area. Other petrified wood the same age and density does not contain these unique hues due to equally unique circumstances.

Minerals and related color found in these fossils:
Copper - green/blue
Cobalt - green/blue
Chromium - green/blue
Manganese - pink
Carbon - black
Iron Oxides - red, brown, yellow
Manganese Oxides - black
Silica - white, Gary

Paleobotanist say; that Arizona petrified wood is about 165 to 225 million years old.  So, if this is true; back when these trees were teaming with live bacteria, the land wasn't actually Arizona, but "Pangea", and there fore it was Pangea  petrified wood, as was it all.

  As we are told, the theory is one continent named Pangea, split up and redistributed itself to where it sits today, all of this at a few centimeters a year. 

Also, until 50 or 60 million years ago, (again, according to scientist) most of the North American Continent was underwater, the exceptions were the mountain ranges on either the West Coast or the East Coast.  In between the coastal mountain ranges was this vast shallow sea that stretched from down deep in Mexico all the way up into  Canada.  This changed as the earth continued to belch and bloat. 

Here's just another thought on the subject: 

These trees (Araucaria evergreens) grew along the western  banks of this great  pond of salty water.  Because of the special soil in the region now called  Arizona and New Mexico, we could assume that the shores were not the sandy beaches that we currently know on the America coast lines, but it would have been a much more exotic mixture of clay settled below the mineral rich saline waters.  This was a place where coral, small fish and crustaceans flourished. As these shoreline trees  toppled, they landed in the swampy enriched  clay filled waters and sunk into this sated brine and over the next 100 million years engorged themselves with even  more of the exotic liquid infusion to produce the wild colors we see today.

More over, because of this plant's genus and its super-inductive abilities, it was already able to have in it the minerals rich in the surrounding soil and water before they passed on into their floric form of mummyism.  Thus, only these great coniferic evergreens became our famous Arizona Rainbow Petrified Wood. 

For more on the tree species and how to identify them; here is a link to a short essay by Ed Strauss, published by Evolvingearth.org. 

What is Araucaria?

Arizona Rainbow petrified wood is from the Araucaria Genus.  Araucaria is a type of evergreen tree or also called a conifer and it tolerates salty water.  Today, there are 19 known species of this genus of which, most are found in: Norfolk Island, Eastern Australia, New Guinea, Argentina, Chile and Southern Brazil. 

Araucarias lack growth rings, unlike its distant Red Wood cousins. This lack of growth ring contributes to its desirous use for paper and pulp.  Today, the araucaria tree of Argentina is harvested to produce very fine paper pulp, which is sold all over the world.

Asian vs. Arizona Petrified Wood

If we examine petrified wood from Asia, it is just as petrified and old, however, it's also a bit plain looking.

Not to say that light tans, ochres and blacks are not elegant in their own way.  Arizona Petrified wood sat in mineral rich water with the various minerals filtering into the molecular structure of the wood thus creating its unique and awesome appearance.