Petrified wood indentification

[Sayitis]

Greeting from a new member.

I'm not very deep into the fossil world but as a rock hound I've picked up some from time to time and enjoy geology and minerals. My partner Judith and I have some of the more common fossils you find at the rock shows, crinoids, ammonites and some fossilized teeth (her dad was a dentist). I've been picking up petrified wood from a local creek here for the last ten or fifteen years, mostly hand size and finger size. Two years ago I came across a large deposit of wood and that got me excited. There was about four hundred pounds that i brought back to clean up and study, the biggest one was three foot by two foot by 1 foot. When I got the pieces back it became clear that a number of them fit together so in part it's a large tree trunk that feel apart after it was fossilized. Geologically this area is in the upper Cretaceous period and lignite with pyrite is more common then petrified wood. I've had thin sections done and could use some help identifying the family or genus and maybe species? I've been using the tools that are out there like insidewood.com but would greatly appreciate help from someone with more experience. It looks like soft wood to me but have not been able to find a good match for the rays. The images were taken with my phone through the microscope lens, not too bad. Thank you in advance for any feedback and help.

[Mediospirifer]

Cool pictures!

Can you post some macro photos of the pieces? I'm no dendrologist, but I know a bit about modern tree identification. If you have a section that has multiple knots or limb stubs, that can rule out a few things (pine vs. maple vs. oak, for instance). Given a slice, I can tell palm or fern from a woody tree.

Would that be helpful?

[Sayitis]

Thanks for your time here. I'll be able to post a couple of photos tomorrow. The pieces I have don't seem to have too many limbs that I can tell though bug tracks are present in many of them. I do have a slice or two to show you. If I was to guess I'd say that what I found belonged to a lower part of the trunk and was bug eaten and rotten before it got covered over and started to be petrified.

[Mediospirifer]

I'll be happy to take a look.

[paleoflor]

Beautiful pictures! What is the scale of these micrographs?

Oak, which is markedly ring-porous and has wide rays, can easily be ruled out on basis of the wood anatomy.

To me, this appears to be a softwood of some sort. Are there any resin channels present?

[Sayitis]

I was surprised and happy that using a phone was able to produce decent pictures. Here is a slab that I cut and polished. I'll post a series of pictures that may be informative. Yes my best guess so far is softwood. I did take some measurements the other day and this is what I saw.

R or radial section

Rays = individual rows .03mm high

Tracheids = .05mm wide to 1mm high

pits? = .01 to .02 dia.

V or tangential section

Rays = .2mm to .8mm high/tall

single vertical line of .05mm wide

X or cross section

Tracheids = .05mm to .01mm dia.

[Sayitis]

Just to round out the context, here is a shot of some pieces in situ as we excavated them. This is the 2015 find, the 2014 group overlaid these but were roughly in the same plane. In hind sight I wish I had mapped it out better but who knew there was so much or that the pieces would fit together as much as they did. As the bank erodes back more there maybe more material or it may have been removed down steam already. I'm wishing for some heavy spring rains.

[Sayitis]

Here are some shots of pieces that I fit together after already having cut some so they would stand up and the one larger one from 2014. You can see that the interior wood shows bore holes or tunnels from bugs. This is very interesting and the next post will show more of these features.

[Sayitis]

Here is an example of a rather large bug track, the red strap is setting in a vertical portion of it. This piece is made up of three individual pieces from 2015.

[Auspex]

Pretty! The insect galleries are neat-o.

Here's a brightened enlargement od the details:

[Sayitis]

This piece is made up of some pieces from 2014 and the largest one from 2015. The 2014 piece you may recognize from the earlier post but turned upside down. There are two other pieces that fit to this one but it is not practical to show them all at once without some serious mount making work.

I cannot explain how I figure out what goes where. I just look at them and walk around and look at them some more, once in a while I pick one piece up and see if it fits to another, some time it does. When that happens it's a very good feeling. If I had a lot of time and more resourcesI I believe most of the lot could be fit together, but who knows how many of the puzzle pieces I have?

You can see a number of voids lined with quartz deposits and small quartz crystals covering the outer part of the tree. These could have been parts of an incomplete replacement in petrification or part of original wood structure? The crystals are still quite sharp so it must have broken apart but not been transported far in the stream bed or these and other surface detail would have been ground off. You can see a number of tracks from insects on the interior. Out of all specimens collected I've only seen evidence of one or two limbs.

[Sayitis]

Auspex

Very cool. I thought I was seeing different colors due to different minerals. You just opened my eyes a bit.

[lfsxdth]

Great finds. Love the insect burrows.

[Sayitis]

Hi Ifsxdth

The burrows do make some nice features. Do you happen to know anyone that could help identify the wood? I see your in Maryland as well.