Petrified Wood
Images (c) 2002-2005 Andrew Alden, licensed to About.com, Inc. (fair use policy)
This piece of petrified wood from the Panoche Hills of central California dates from the latest Cretaceous (about 66 million years ago). The log it once belonged to floated into the sea, where small mollusks much like today's shipworms riddled it with holes until it sank to the muddy bottom. James Hutton described a similar specimen in 1785: "This specimen of wood contains in itself, even without the stratum of stone in which it is embedded, the most perfect record of its genealogy. It had been eaten or perforated by those sea-worms which destroy the bottoms of our ships. There is the clearest evidence of this truth. Therefore, this wood had grown upon land which stood above the level of the sea, while the present land was only forming at the bottom of the ocean." That is, this stone proves the existence of a substantial body of land and a neighboring sea—a whole world now almost vanished in deep time. See more photos in the Fossil Wood Gallery.
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