Petrified Forest and Petrified Wood

Petrified Forest and Petrified Wood

By: Robert Miller

Introduction:

A petrified forest provides information about fossils that have already transitioned by premineralization. These fossils are primarily made up of silicate minerals, such as quartz. The most common location for a “petrified forest” is in the town of Holbrook, Arizona at the Petrified Forest National Park. The approximate age from the Petrified Forest National Park is about the Late Triassic period. The plant life is very diverse being from the Late Triassic period because of unique preservation due to wildfires of today and the dry desert environment.

Origins of the Petrified Forest:

History:

The Late Triassic period is the approximate relative age of the Petrified Forest National Park located near Holbrook, Arizona. This period of geologic time of this area contained numerous amounts of life in a very warm and watery landscape approximately 200 million years ago. The largest find ever made in the Petrified Forest National Park to this day is 11 crocodile-like creatures known as Revueltosaurus callenderi (Marquis, 2013). The common crocodile-like creature found at the Petrified Forest National Park was discovered to be a herbivore, a plant-eating creature, but these creatures may have eaten insects and small animals.

Ecosystem/Environment/Life:

The environment of a warm and watery landscape may be hard to imagine; however, the relative age of the sediments indicated rivers as large as the modern day Mississippi River may have flowed there. Different varieties of plant life found near these rivers would have supported an ecosystem that would have been very large from the small insects that feed on these plants to larger animals that would feed on insects or plants to the large eating dinosaurs that would consume the plant-eating animals.

Minerals of the Petrified Forest:

Examples of Minerals Found:

The Petrified Forest National Park is home to several mineral types. These...