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A projection of rain in the forecast for Saturday caused me to change my plans at the last minute and venture a little further west than I had initially planned and hoped to go. Since I had not yet visited Whiskey Bridge since moving to Texas at the beginning of September I decided that it posed as a nice alternative, especially when trying to decide on Friday night where to go the following morning. Plus this way I could also collect some petrified wood in College Station. This petrified wood is from the Late Middle Eocene Yegua Formation and is absolutely abundant in the Bryan-College Station area. Petrified wood chips literally cover the ground. Whether recent rain from Tropical Storm Nicholas unearthed a number of pieces or I simply lucked out with the site having not been collected in a while, but in about an hour of collecting, I found more than a dozen good size chunks of petrified wood. I was really impressed by the diversity of colors and how many of the pieces looked like pieces of wood you would find today. Several pieces had knots in them, showed insect damage, or had small deposits of chalcedony or druzy on them. All of my finds were either tropical hardwoods or tropical conifers. After having my fill of petrified wood, I made my way to Whiskey Bridge and had the site to myself for the entire day. I am still working on cleaning, stabilizing and identifying all of my finds, so a post on my Whiskey Bridge finds will have to wait for another day.

Howdy! Just about every piece of the metric tons I've collected have, pretty much, fits into a neat category of: broken and irregular end, smooth surfaces, weathered and jagged, or tumbled and rounded. But I found something a couple of days ago that I've never seen before and rather than trying to settle on one wild hypothesis, I thought I'd ask the experts! This piece was found near a body of water in Brazos County, TX in the Yegua. It looks as if it would have been a general cube shape, except for one corner that's missing. I'm also puzzled due to the direction of the grain. Here's my conundrum. I don't think it was broken post-petrification. I've never seen a broken surface with this texture. Hopefully, you can see the lighter colored sort of ring that follows the edge of the missing corner. I've found some pieces where it looks like it was the end of a limb that broke off of a larger limb and, in my experiences so far, none looked like this. Am I just hoping for something unusual, or is this just a normal thing I've never seen before and, if so, what is it? I think I did okay with the images, but let me know if you need/want additional pics or whatever. Thank you so much for looking and helping out if you can!