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Please Explain This


Duppa

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Hi all I just joined up today. I found something that I can not work out. I was walking along a dry creek bed in central Queensland Aus and found what looks like a piece of petrified wood encased in rock. How did this happen? Why didn't it burn up? Any ideas?

IMG_20200115_110324.jpg

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Hello Duppa and welcome to TFF from Austin, Tx.  We have a number of active and very experienced members of TFF from Australia here so you are right at home with a good group - both inside and outside Australia.

 

That is a VERY nice, large specimen. 

 

As to how it happened, think time sequence.  First the tree fell, then was covered by sediments and petrified, than it lay there until erosion occurred and uncovered it as you see it now.

 

[Of course it is also possible that  it could have been covered by sediments, uncovered by erosion, recovered by sediments, uncovered again, etc. etc. to this point in time where you find it now.  Such are the wonders of geological time and changes of earth's surface and subsurface strata over literally (in this case) 10's to 100's of million years, depending on the age of the substrate and the fossil itself.  Mind blowing ain't it!]  :P

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Why would it burn up?  Not all rock is from molten means.

 

Wood Fossilization 101:  Wood falls, gets covered in sediments or sinks in water ( both can create an anaerobic environment with little or no Oxygen, which prevents natural decay ).

Over time minerals seep through the ground and into the pores/ cells of the wood replacing the cells with minerals and thus turning to stone.

Or you can have the wood rot away within the hardened sediments leaving a perfect "log" shaped void.  Along comes those minerals seeping through the ground and fills the void with minerals that eventually takes on the exact shape of the lost wood piece and leaves a stone cast of the original item.  

Log is either turned to stone ( petrified ) or replaced by stone in the form of a fossil cast. :)

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Hi Grandpa and Caldigger and thanks for your replies. 

OK there is a bit more to this story. After an internet search I found a similar discovery had been made while digging a ventilation shaft for a nearby underground coal mine. The workers found a near complete tree encased in basalt. Studies were completed and samples were taken. The age of the basalt was around 40 million years and the age of the wood was under 40 thousand years. They could not explain how this could be. If interested search for petrified wood found encased in rock at Crinum Central Queensland.

Cheers. 

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1 hour ago, Duppa said:

Hi Grandpa and Caldigger and thanks for your replies. 

OK there is a bit more to this story. After an internet search I found a similar discovery had been made while digging a ventilation shaft for a nearby underground coal mine. The workers found a near complete tree encased in basalt. Studies were completed and samples were taken. The age of the basalt was around 40 million years and the age of the wood was under 40 thousand years. They could not explain how this could be. If interested search for petrified wood found encased in rock at Crinum Central Queensland.

Cheers. 

I think it can be summed up in two words. human error 

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Just now, Rockwood said:

I think it can be summed up in two words. human error 

Or pseudoscience with an agenda.

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I'm not sure what you mean by that. I'm only new to this type of thing. It just doesn't make sense to me. The rock it is imbeded in doesn't look like a sedimentry type of rock to me. It also has a lot of rounded river stones imbeded in it. It's in an area with many old volcano's too, if that means anything? 

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Here is part of the paper’s abstract- 

In the context of the Creation/Flood model of earth history the fossilized wood is from trees which grew in the immediate post-Flood period. The decelerating Australian plate drifted over a mantle hotspot, a structural weakness in the crust allowing magma to erupt as basalt which engulfed the trees. The fossilized wood’s radiocarbon demonstrates the basalt’s youthfulness and the failure of radioisotopic “dating,” but is consistent with a Flood/immediate post-Flood stronger magnetic field.

 

 

426285FB-B0BC-44CC-ACCD-2BC5CF3C1AED.jpeg

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I didn't thoroughly read the story, but life experience has taught me that when it is time to choose weather the physics are wrong or the human is wrong the choice is clear.

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Yes that is the article I was referring to. 

I'm very skeptical of the dating techniques used as they are based on too many assumptions that will greatly affect the outcome. 

 

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41 minutes ago, Duppa said:

You just need to look at the layers in eroded mountains and the coal seams trapped beneath sediment. I could only see that happening with a rapid deposition of the sediment. What are your thoughts on this? 

Rising sea level flooding coastal swamps if the most common cause of the rapid deposition. When thoroughly studied other evidence fills in the details well.  

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Hello there.

I am convinced that there have been a great number of floods in the history of the earth, as well as vulcanic eruptions (which may cover trees and other things quickly not only in molten rock, but also in ashes without burning everything).

Many of the most interesting fossils have their origin in catastrophic events, because in the normal everyday life most things got eaten before they could be preserved.

 

On the other hand I don´t see a problem of layered rocks building up over long times, encasing slightly different  mussel shells and other hard marine animal remains in every specific layer of time as we see they did, and as they still do today.

 

Best regards,

J

 

 

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something

Thomas Henry Huxley

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Interesting conversation. I am not convinced that the specimen in question is wood. When zooming in, I don see any of the consistent wood grain that I would expect. Rather there seems to be a lot of sandy, non-grained texture. In a rock face that is this weathered, you would expect to see weathering along the plain of the grain, consistent linear chunks breaking off, etc.

 

Is there any chance that this is a very suggestively shaped piece of limonite?

 

Maybe its just too early in the morning and my eyes have gone all gimpy :DOH:

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Hi all and thank you for the input. All this is very interesting and I guess we we never know 100% how all this came to be as no one was there to witness it. I'll put a few more pictures up if you're not convinced it is wood. When I tapp it, it sounds more like wood than rock, or even fossilised wood. It's just struck me as very bizarre. 

IMG_20200115_110333.jpg

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Mind you it is positioned in the bottom of a dry creek bed. It probably only flows once or twice a year, but when it does it really flows! My other picture is to large to upload. 

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Yes it does look very much like sandstone but if you saw the surrounding rocks, it appears to have flowed from a nearby hill at some point. Also this is not where those samples were taken, probably 100km south of here. 

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2 hours ago, sharkdoctor said:

Interesting conversation. I am not convinced that the specimen in question is wood. When zooming in, I don see any of the consistent wood grain that I would expect. Rather there seems to be a lot of sandy, non-grained texture. In a rock face that is this weathered, you would expect to see weathering along the plain of the grain, consistent linear chunks breaking off, etc.

 

Is there any chance that this is a very suggestively shaped piece of limonite?

 

Maybe its just too early in the morning and my eyes have gone all gimpy :DOH:

A different perspective.

In the first photos I have to share your concern about the grain. The morphology of it is a good match for rotting wood with a twisted grain though.

The last photo I find consistent with a cavity being formed as wood decomposes . Pockets  where compaction was incomplete in a cement casting look sort of that way when you remove the form.

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I'll go back tomorrow and get some photos of the surrounding area as well as brushing the loose sand out of for a better view. I'm only new to this but I'm certain is wood (or was wood) 

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16 minutes ago, TqB said:

I think it's likely to be a large rip-up clast of shale or other laminated rock. 

Until clear evidence of the small scale structure being wood is shown the thing to do would be to stay with this explanation on the sheer mathematical odds. 

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I don't think any amount of photographs, save for microscope thin slices, is going to tell us whether the item in question is wood or something else. 

 

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    Tim    VETERAN SHALE SPLITTER

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