Petrified Stick?

[sdelano]

Hello...I'm a weekend rockhound guy.  So I admit I don't know as much as I would like to regarding this hobby of mine.  A couple of weeks ago, I was digging around in an exposed layer of black shale in northeastern Oklahoma looking for pyrite crystals and marcasite nodules which I found plenty of...but...at one point deep in my dig, I came across a layer of gray clay that I could easily mold in my hand.  As I scraped away the clay, I came across what appeared to be approximately a 10 inch long petrified stick or something similar.  I have attached some photo's.  If any of you have ever seen this before, what is it?  It appears to be as hard as the black shale that it was surrounded by but remember it was in a clay pocket.  It was already broken within the pocket but aligned so you could tell it was one piece at some point.  Any help is appreciated...TIA!!

[JohnJ]

@sdelano

 

Your post was moved to its own topic. 

 

Do you have larger, close up images of the broken ends?

[eeyipes]

Have you tried to puzzle the pieces back together? Several times when I've picked up pieces of random petrified wood from the same area, I've discovered that some of them fit together once they were cleaned up and you could see the patterns and colors in the the wood.

[tmaier]

Sometimes wood becomes stuck in these holes and covered with clay, and the wood becomes saturated with silica particles, giving the impression that it is petrified, when actually it is just saturated, and the wood still exits. The wood can seem very hard and rock-like.

To tell if it is just saturated wood, do some experiments on tiny fragments of it. Pound it with a hammer and see if it becomes a power with a "fuzz". The fuzz is the cellulose of the wood. Try burning it with a lighter, and look for blackening and maybe smoke (maybe not smoke), but also burning should cause the wood to be chased off, and leave a very friable remnant (it falls to dust, since the wood matrix is decomposed now).

[Rockwood]

The clay may also be a weathered concretion which formed around the wood before the shale consolidated.

[sdelano]

To answer an earlier post, there do not appear to be any "tree rings" when you look at the ends of these pieces.  I will try to get a picture of the ends, but I'd be surprised if you saw something that would help.  It just appears to be the black shale.  If it helps any, I do believe that I am in a Devonian shale layer.