wife found a piece of petrified at the ranch the other weekend. its a side peice.. but looks to have .....which i know isnt right. but a screw that had been screwed into it....or possibly some sort of burring bug...pretty interesting....

i'll try and take a pic this evening

chris

Buprestidae, the family of Spiral Borer Beetles dates back to the Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous with over 100 species described.

I've found petrified wood even in South Texas with signs of wood boring beetles. Not real common but not unheard of either.

Good ID Red, that opens up a world of knowledge...
The Buprestid Beetle still munches trees today so it outlived the dinosaur extinction. Modern day bugologists have cataloged 15,000 species ( Ive never
been comfortable with such astronomical ID's on a single type creature )

Known as the JEWEL BEETLE, I accidentally used the beetle in flint reports back in May....





In my fossil days, our club did field trips to E TX on a ranch vary rich with petrified wood..First trip we killed ourselves getting log sized
pieces to the vehicles..second trip we gleaned more modest large pieces.
By the third trip we were all on a new tack....Only collecting the most
unique pieces like Knots, branch to trunk pieces, with bark, and insect
( including Buprestid )tunnels.

A fossil vendor at one of the shows was selling SEVERELY tunneled "worm wood " ( Non Texas )...very high dollar..

The equivalent to a Corner Tang blade in the petrified world is a Petrified pine cone

Anybody got a Petrf arrowhead made from a knot or Beetled ?

There have been a couple of petrified wood finds in Nebraska that exhibited beaver teeth marks and woodpecker bore holes. Its entirely possible to find such specimens here in Texas because the beavers, woodpeckers and the future petrified wood were all well along in their evolutionary journey and existed here together as early as the Miocene .

sorry this took so long!!!








...hope this works.... and the biggest piece has been about the size of my forarm....but we usually find fist size /smaller.. but i have a tub of it!!

thanks for looking... longtime lurker.../sometimes poster...

Edit... i've only found 2 petrified points on my ranch.... i can post later you'd like to see

Good show Chris, now your a member of the " unusual Petrif club "
On that second pic down, notice that the coloration ( and possibly texture ) around the insect hole is different. The tree healing process ??

This topic prompted me to uncrate a few pieces of wood from my fossil days..



Deciduous X?X Tree with a knot or limb limb node..Palm wood..Almost ANY piece of Palm is beautifully unique. Hard to see in the pic but this one, some of
the trunk part eroded leaving the "grain" like a bundle of straws.



Coniferous Pine tree bark section.



Like the Huge fossil bones the ancients must have found, wonder what they made of these stone trees ?

awesome pics!!!!.... that one is huge!!!!.. i love the pine bark too...

we get allot that look like just old oaks i would assume.. they still have the bark ..

here's one more chunk.... we get some beautiful colors out of or petrified here.. allot of deep reds, oranges... pinks.... and allot that look burnt.

this one i thought was cool...it made it back to the house as a show piece...






i wish i had a better one to show you the rings... ..side view~

thanks agian

chris