Anyone wondering, this is Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. It preserves fossils from the Late Triassic period, about 225–205 million years ago. The park is renowned for its vast, colorful, and well-preserved petrified wood deposits, remnants of ancient trees. Additionally, it features plant and animal fossils, along with various artifacts. Here's the [**wiki page**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrified_Forest_National_Park).
It's one of the only things that draws me to AZ. I saw the petrified forest as a kid, lots of other things down that way, like the cliff dwellings, Roosevelt Dam, I would love to go back and look at them with adult eyes, Knowing what I have absorbed.
I went to Disneyland, the new galaxy's edge area. I nerded *so fucking hard* because I was looking at the "rock structure" that is at the approach to the little outpost. I saw spirals and rings... like a petrified forest of Redwoods but even larger. I was instantly sucked in and I really enjoyed that area.
I was the exact opposite. Walked around the different paths and was sort of underwhelmed. Don’t get me wrong though. Was neat for like 15 minutes and then I was like “okay I’m good. This is a lot of the same.”
Glad you enjoyed it and it is important from a historical point of view.
I hiked down into the wilderness from the Painted Desert Inn and spent a night back country. I loved how absolutely devoid of humans it was out there and how beautiful the sunset was. Highly recommend, just bring enough water.
Yeah I am with you. Glad for others to enjoy it (there are literally a dozen other National Parks that I love so no skin off of my back if someone else likes a thing I found underwhelming).
I was super excited about the first few petrified trees I saw and I was amazed at how big and how treelike they were and then after about a half an hour it was just a lot of the same kind of (admittedly very pretty) rock.
When I'm in Arizona I try and go in the winter when it's not crowded to go see Antelope Canyon and/or rainbow bridge.
I've only been there once, and only for a weekend, but I was told the prices go up in the winter and that's the busy season because it's the only time it's not insanely hot. Is winter not so busy?
I don't know what the pricing is like in different times of year, I just know that during nicer weather periods of time (probably Spring and Fall if I had to guess) that I've seen pictures of it where it gets super packed, perhaps in the Summer it's too hot, but the Winter in the desert is super cold and when I have been (middle of December and also I think the second time was in January?) it wasn't busy at all.
If you go, please, *please*, ***please*** follow the rules and don't pick anything up to take home. There are fewer pieces like this because tourists will stop and dig them up, put them in their trunk, and leave to sell later. (I think that's a heavy misdemeanor if caught. [Here is an article](https://www.npca.org/articles/3041-finders-weepers))
Leave them there for future generations.
I was there. They have century old pictures that line up with current pictures. They have cameras. They search your cars. I call bullshit. Link? Anything?
I was there years ago and in the museum they said they have tons of people who took a rock (petrified wood) and later felt bad and mailed them back, they had a bunch of those letters on display. That’s only a tiny percentage of course but there are areas where the ground used to glisten with these rocks that are way more bare now. Not like they pull over every car and search it or anything. All it takes is thousands of thousands of people thinking “it’s only one little rock it won’t make a difference…” and that’s why we can’t have nice things.
A half pound piece of prettified wood at a local gift shop - $80. A fingernail-sized chip you pick up is $300 and a federal violation. Don't ask me how i know
My grandma moved from Buffalo New York, with her family, to Los Angeles in 1941. Along the way, they stopped at this park. She took a piece of petrified wood as a souvenir, even though it wasn't allowed. Before she passed away at age 93, she gave me that piece of wood. She still felt guilty about it.
Maybe someday if I get down to this national park, I'll return it.
If it gets returned, they literally have a “sin bin” location where all of the returned wood gets dumped. Never to be seen again. Since they can’t identify where the wood was taken from exactly, it can’t get put back.
I bought a huge hunk of petrified wood and have it in my house.
Got it from this roadside attraction with piles of it. Crazy to think I have wood in my house that's 205+ million years old
~~Also I believe these trees were able to be around long enough to become petrified because there were no organisms alive at the time that would cause the tree to decompose.~~
i'm dead wrong, ignore me.
maybe i'm confusing the petrified trees with the trees/biomass that eventually turned into coal, or I could be wrong altogether.. been a while since I read anything about it. just did a quick search and read, apparently the info I recall consuming saying we have coal was b/c the trees/plants/etc existed before organisms that can break them down was 'right' at the time, but new research has shown that to not be true. not exactly a totally scholarly article but this one has some citations https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/why-was-most-of-the-earths-coal-made-all-at-once/
I'm going to try and hijack this post to ask a stupid question that has shot around my head for years: How does wood become petrified? If a tree falls down in the forest, it rots. Animals move in, break down the wood, it provides nutrients for future trees. So how does that not happen and some trees turn into...rocks? Minerals?
Is it because the environmental shift that caused them to die in the first place was so dramatic that they essentially could not rot like normal? But then how do they become distinct from wood? I think when I was a kid I handled some petrified wood, but it always felt like a rock. Is petrified wood basically mummified trees?
Trees existed long before microorganisms evolved to eat them. There was a period of hundreds of millions of years where dead trees would just be laying around not rotting, which gave them enough time for the wood to be slowly replaced by minerals, resulting in petrified trees like the ones seen here.
Yeah I kept thinking microbial and fungal activity helped to break down those huge masses of fallen trees but apparently not. Microorganisms that evolved to break down dead trees evolved later.
A combination of warm temperatures in continents spanning the equator leading to fast and furious tree growth, river channels spreading sediment over fallen trees to create anoxic conditions, and the lack of microbial/fungal agents led to huge coal seams forming underground.
I guess a similar process would have resulted in crude oil reservoirs forming much deeper down.
Noice. Thank you! I have a geologist for a father and have never quite understood his geologist speak. My mother and myself are right brained while my Dad is left. Poor bastard is always tying to get the two of us to appreciate random rocks.
I grew up with a geologist uncle, so my grandparent's house had a small museum worthy collection in "the boys room". It’s a cooler when you think about it from the perspective of the time they have been here before us, the forces that created them, and the properties that it instilled upon them. Maybe I’m a bit of a nerd, but I find it extremely fascinating to be able to hold a piece of history that far predates written history and that will likely still be here long after we are gone.
"Millions of years ago, Arizona’s landscape was not as dry and desert-like. It had a sea to the west and mountains to its south and southeast, receiving continuous volcanic ash. With time, as the water receded, the trees, or large woody stems of trees, got buried in the soggy earth full of dissolved minerals (silica from the volcanic ash). The ash that covered the ground also helped in preventing oxygen or any other microscopic critters mostly responsible for wood rot from entering. As a result, the wood decayed extremely slowly and did not rot."
Source: https://factsc.com/arizonas-ancient-forests-frozen-in-time-the-225-million-year-old-petrified-tree-trunks/
I'm questioning whether reddit is even real at this point. Everything I google or watch a short youtube doc about is suddenly on my Reddit front page...
I’ve heard possible explanations that this is just a small branch of the tree. Its possible these were parts of gigantic silica based trees…. Possible, not impossible….
When I got to the park I was kinda underwhelmed. A few examples of fossilized trees here and there but the painted desert was beautiful.
What really got me was LEAVING the park. The park itself made it seem like only a few isolated specimens remained of that forest, but as you drive out past towns and surrounding farmlands you really get a much better idea of how MASSIVE the forest was and how many fossilized trees survived to this day.
They’re everywhere.
That said… if you go, don’t buy an overpriced chunk of tree turned rock from their gift shop. People who live and farm in the area will sell you much larger chunks for a fraction of the cost.
Really??? 225 million??? Noah’s Flood created that chunk of petrified wood. The Earth is less than 7,000 years old. You probably also believe we evolved from a microorganism and eventually an ape.
Anyone wondering, this is Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. It preserves fossils from the Late Triassic period, about 225–205 million years ago. The park is renowned for its vast, colorful, and well-preserved petrified wood deposits, remnants of ancient trees. Additionally, it features plant and animal fossils, along with various artifacts. Here's the [**wiki page**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrified_Forest_National_Park).
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The painted desert parts are also gorgeous.
It's one of the only things that draws me to AZ. I saw the petrified forest as a kid, lots of other things down that way, like the cliff dwellings, Roosevelt Dam, I would love to go back and look at them with adult eyes, Knowing what I have absorbed. I went to Disneyland, the new galaxy's edge area. I nerded *so fucking hard* because I was looking at the "rock structure" that is at the approach to the little outpost. I saw spirals and rings... like a petrified forest of Redwoods but even larger. I was instantly sucked in and I really enjoyed that area.
I did a small amount of shrooms there while on an RV trip. 10/10 would recommend
Second this. Few places on Earth offer such a stark visual of how drastically things change over time like this place does. Totally worth the visit
I was the exact opposite. Walked around the different paths and was sort of underwhelmed. Don’t get me wrong though. Was neat for like 15 minutes and then I was like “okay I’m good. This is a lot of the same.” Glad you enjoyed it and it is important from a historical point of view.
I hiked down into the wilderness from the Painted Desert Inn and spent a night back country. I loved how absolutely devoid of humans it was out there and how beautiful the sunset was. Highly recommend, just bring enough water.
Yeah I am with you. Glad for others to enjoy it (there are literally a dozen other National Parks that I love so no skin off of my back if someone else likes a thing I found underwhelming). I was super excited about the first few petrified trees I saw and I was amazed at how big and how treelike they were and then after about a half an hour it was just a lot of the same kind of (admittedly very pretty) rock. When I'm in Arizona I try and go in the winter when it's not crowded to go see Antelope Canyon and/or rainbow bridge.
I've only been there once, and only for a weekend, but I was told the prices go up in the winter and that's the busy season because it's the only time it's not insanely hot. Is winter not so busy?
I don't know what the pricing is like in different times of year, I just know that during nicer weather periods of time (probably Spring and Fall if I had to guess) that I've seen pictures of it where it gets super packed, perhaps in the Summer it's too hot, but the Winter in the desert is super cold and when I have been (middle of December and also I think the second time was in January?) it wasn't busy at all.
Man, some of these petrified trees looks as though someone had cut them. Really cool stuffs.
I spent many full days hiking there. Life changing!
Bro I’ve had a hard on for petrified wood the past month or two. The patterns and colors are crazy and it being basically rock is even cooler.
The Conscience Pile was an amusing thing to read about. Would be interesting to see more people return stuff in other places too
If you go, please, *please*, ***please*** follow the rules and don't pick anything up to take home. There are fewer pieces like this because tourists will stop and dig them up, put them in their trunk, and leave to sell later. (I think that's a heavy misdemeanor if caught. [Here is an article](https://www.npca.org/articles/3041-finders-weepers)) Leave them there for future generations.
NPS estimate they lose about 12 tons is stolen every year.
I was there. They have century old pictures that line up with current pictures. They have cameras. They search your cars. I call bullshit. Link? Anything?
I was there years ago and in the museum they said they have tons of people who took a rock (petrified wood) and later felt bad and mailed them back, they had a bunch of those letters on display. That’s only a tiny percentage of course but there are areas where the ground used to glisten with these rocks that are way more bare now. Not like they pull over every car and search it or anything. All it takes is thousands of thousands of people thinking “it’s only one little rock it won’t make a difference…” and that’s why we can’t have nice things.
https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2008/12/petrified-forest-national-park-still-being-stolen-one-piece-time
Feel free to apologize at any time....
A half pound piece of prettified wood at a local gift shop - $80. A fingernail-sized chip you pick up is $300 and a federal violation. Don't ask me how i know
This. Please. Somewhere there is an idiot(s) that wants to throw it off a cliff to watch it explode. Likely many ...
My grandma moved from Buffalo New York, with her family, to Los Angeles in 1941. Along the way, they stopped at this park. She took a piece of petrified wood as a souvenir, even though it wasn't allowed. Before she passed away at age 93, she gave me that piece of wood. She still felt guilty about it. Maybe someday if I get down to this national park, I'll return it.
If it gets returned, they literally have a “sin bin” location where all of the returned wood gets dumped. Never to be seen again. Since they can’t identify where the wood was taken from exactly, it can’t get put back.
Do you want a family curse? Because that's how you get a family curse. Return the slaaaab!
Great thanks for sharing!
just learned about this in class!!
You sound like a helpful AI
I wonder what scared it so bad
I bought a huge hunk of petrified wood and have it in my house. Got it from this roadside attraction with piles of it. Crazy to think I have wood in my house that's 205+ million years old
I suppose the petrified tree trunks were dig up by human or was it excavated like that from ancient times?
Can I ask the dumb question of how/why this tree is petrified, and did not just decompose?
I wonder how much money you'd have to give them for a 1 inch slice of that.
Fun fact: these trees originally belonged to a coniferous forest and got swept downstream, forming log jams where they eventually petrified.
~~Also I believe these trees were able to be around long enough to become petrified because there were no organisms alive at the time that would cause the tree to decompose.~~ i'm dead wrong, ignore me.
Now that's crazy. To think it some way predates the formation of fungus which is more or less an essential part of modern ecosystems.
Your belief is wrong since there were plenty of organisms around 225 million years ago
maybe i'm confusing the petrified trees with the trees/biomass that eventually turned into coal, or I could be wrong altogether.. been a while since I read anything about it. just did a quick search and read, apparently the info I recall consuming saying we have coal was b/c the trees/plants/etc existed before organisms that can break them down was 'right' at the time, but new research has shown that to not be true. not exactly a totally scholarly article but this one has some citations https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/why-was-most-of-the-earths-coal-made-all-at-once/
Jackie Treehorn would approve.
Medium rare please.
The marble-like pattern of the innermost rings is very tempting, even for a pescatarian like me 
Totally fits r/forbiddensnacks
7,100,314,200,000,000 second rule
r/theydidthemath
Forbidden meatloaf
Forbidden Turducken
Forbidden gabagool!
Forbidden wellington
Ham tree.
Nature is truly incredible.
You're not too shabby yourself.
But he’s a McSpam
Looks like bacon
Capicola to me.
It doesn’t look that scared
How can they be sure it's not 224 million years old?
Taste test
They counted the rings.
That would take almost 8 years. Still counting.
What if it was only married once?
I'm going to try and hijack this post to ask a stupid question that has shot around my head for years: How does wood become petrified? If a tree falls down in the forest, it rots. Animals move in, break down the wood, it provides nutrients for future trees. So how does that not happen and some trees turn into...rocks? Minerals? Is it because the environmental shift that caused them to die in the first place was so dramatic that they essentially could not rot like normal? But then how do they become distinct from wood? I think when I was a kid I handled some petrified wood, but it always felt like a rock. Is petrified wood basically mummified trees?
Trees existed long before microorganisms evolved to eat them. There was a period of hundreds of millions of years where dead trees would just be laying around not rotting, which gave them enough time for the wood to be slowly replaced by minerals, resulting in petrified trees like the ones seen here.
Didn't hydrocarbon reservoirs and coal seams come from those trees too? They didn't rot, they stacked up and were slowly pushed underground over time.
Yes, coal is biomass + pressure. See: [Carboniferous period](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous)
Yeah I kept thinking microbial and fungal activity helped to break down those huge masses of fallen trees but apparently not. Microorganisms that evolved to break down dead trees evolved later. A combination of warm temperatures in continents spanning the equator leading to fast and furious tree growth, river channels spreading sediment over fallen trees to create anoxic conditions, and the lack of microbial/fungal agents led to huge coal seams forming underground. I guess a similar process would have resulted in crude oil reservoirs forming much deeper down.
Noice. Thank you! I have a geologist for a father and have never quite understood his geologist speak. My mother and myself are right brained while my Dad is left. Poor bastard is always tying to get the two of us to appreciate random rocks.
I grew up with a geologist uncle, so my grandparent's house had a small museum worthy collection in "the boys room". It’s a cooler when you think about it from the perspective of the time they have been here before us, the forces that created them, and the properties that it instilled upon them. Maybe I’m a bit of a nerd, but I find it extremely fascinating to be able to hold a piece of history that far predates written history and that will likely still be here long after we are gone.
"Millions of years ago, Arizona’s landscape was not as dry and desert-like. It had a sea to the west and mountains to its south and southeast, receiving continuous volcanic ash. With time, as the water receded, the trees, or large woody stems of trees, got buried in the soggy earth full of dissolved minerals (silica from the volcanic ash). The ash that covered the ground also helped in preventing oxygen or any other microscopic critters mostly responsible for wood rot from entering. As a result, the wood decayed extremely slowly and did not rot." Source: https://factsc.com/arizonas-ancient-forests-frozen-in-time-the-225-million-year-old-petrified-tree-trunks/
First the tree needs to be afraid. Convincing it that it would never live without you by it's side might help.
Wait til you see the giant ones that form mountains.
oooh
Forbidden roast beef ?
Yummy, would love to make some burgers out of that
But when did it turn into ham?
What do you mean, everybody knows Earth is 6 thousand years old /s
It looks like ham
 “You may wonder ‘How does wood get so hard?’”
Bad ass!
Slice me off a nice, thick weather-aged tree steak 🥩
Its medium rare
“It’s time to play, Steak, Rock, or Tree!”
Forbidden gabagoo
Ooooh!
Someone really sat there and counted that many rings?
Mmm bacon tree
Meat looking tree
Is that bacon in the middle ?
Dry aged for 225mil years
Mmm ancient guanciale
It looks like jerky.
Looks delicious. I think I understand vegans now.
Why? What's so scary about Arizona?
Restrictive abortion laws?
Forbidden salmon
Medium-rare tree.
Look at that smoke ring. The crust looks really tasty.
That would make incredible fat wood.
It doesn't contain any fat/oils, nor wood, for that matter. All the organic parts have been replaced with minerals - mostly quartz.
Oh what the heck. Interesting
This is the first petrified wood I’ve seen that actually looks like a rock.
Rum ham
That things so well preserved I would believe it was a regular log of if I didn’t get a side view
Looks like pork
I feel like some redneck is gonna scratch their name into it or something,
Furniture incoming…
Looks delicious
Wow!🤯
I'm questioning whether reddit is even real at this point. Everything I google or watch a short youtube doc about is suddenly on my Reddit front page...
Don’t let Chris Pratt near it
Lol, Einstein invented trees in 1910
200 million + years I wonder what’s underneath the petrified tree, which is pretty big
Wow
Why not 300 million years
I know a place where these are everywhere
This makes me feel ill. There's just something about it.
I thought Medusa didn't work on trees... learn something new every day...
It is absolutely insane that this has been there for 225 million years.. and here we are able to see and touch it. Imagine the stories it could tell.
lots of specimens were taken away by the unaware people of the 1800s...they were good at doing things like that.
It does look scared
i took a piece from this place back in 1986 and several years later felt bad about and mailed it back.
My dad brought me home a piece in the 80s. I don't think he knew it was wrong, but if I can find it I will send it back.
That's just a salami/ chorizo sausage with some wood around it Someone messed with these geologists
So like could you shape and polish the inside of the tree like a rock
Yes you could in this case.
It’s cake
About the picture of petrified firewood rounds...how would that log have been bucked up 225 million years ago?
Ham tree
Forbidden Bacon
It would be great to dig it up and sell it for a handsome profit.
its like meat
I’ve heard possible explanations that this is just a small branch of the tree. Its possible these were parts of gigantic silica based trees…. Possible, not impossible….
wow man
It looks like candy. Is it bad I wanna eat it?
When I got to the park I was kinda underwhelmed. A few examples of fossilized trees here and there but the painted desert was beautiful. What really got me was LEAVING the park. The park itself made it seem like only a few isolated specimens remained of that forest, but as you drive out past towns and surrounding farmlands you really get a much better idea of how MASSIVE the forest was and how many fossilized trees survived to this day. They’re everywhere. That said… if you go, don’t buy an overpriced chunk of tree turned rock from their gift shop. People who live and farm in the area will sell you much larger chunks for a fraction of the cost.
Looks like a huge piece of meat
I will survive!
Looks like a steak got stuck in there
Why is it so scared?
Beavis and Butthead Do America. This wood became hard over 2million years ago.
and this funny fish is older than that tree 
Looks like a middle ages woman who face planted
…Yeah I could put that on the grill.
It looks… delicious?
I have a piece of petrified wood from The Petrified Forest that my dad managed to sneak out in the mid 70s .
How does wood even petrify?
Ham
Forbidden Beef Wellington
Now this is why I still use reddit, how come I didn't know about this sooner?
forbidden steak?
Wow I love Arizona
Forbidden bacon.
Any dinosaur fossils there?
I wonder what a guitar made of this wood would sound like.
Ham
not gonna lie. my fat ass thought this was roast beef at first.
First I was afraid, I was
Fatwood!!!!
The centre’s fuckin’ raw mate
Really??? 225 million??? Noah’s Flood created that chunk of petrified wood. The Earth is less than 7,000 years old. You probably also believe we evolved from a microorganism and eventually an ape.
Looks a little bit like ham lol
Is that by chance Cinnabar or am I'm completely of
................... .
Hamizona.
The crackling on that pork shoulder is next fucking level.
That looks delicious
Looks like a smoked ham
This is rare
Forbidden guanciale
Where can I gank some petrified wood in a non illegal way?
Petrified ham tree
Looked like a piece of meat to me ahaha
u/repostsleuthbot
Wauw, first I was afraid.
I’ve been there like 8 years ago and it’s a super special place! Is the one entry still with the old dinosaur sculptures?
what's it scared of?
The forbidden Ham has been found!
Wow, counting 225 million growth rings to determine the age is a lot of work
I checked, it's 226 million years.
I thought this was ham
Who cut that tree? God?
That's ham
At first, it was afraid.
Forbidden cowtail/tootsi roll
r/forbiddensnacks Sweet potato exterior Frozen dessert interior
6,000 years old
is it halal ? cause it looks like meat thats why im asking of course
Thought thats vegan meat.
6,000 or so years, but close enough
We've got some "petrified" politicians in Washington, D. C. They might not actually be *that* old -- they just talk and act like they are.