Credit Courtesy of Shannon Rhodes
“Charlie climbed onto the bed and tried to calm the three old people who were still petrified with fear. ‘Please don t be frightened,’ he said. ‘It s quite safe. And we re going to the most wonderful place in the world!’
Author Roald Dahl uses the word petrified as being motionless, stonelike, frightfully frozen, as he describes Charlie Bucket’s puzzled grandparents and his own excitement about a trip to Mr. Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.
Utah’s San Rafael Swell rates as one of the most wonderful places in my world, and not because of an abundance of chocolate or gleeful oompa loompas. Beneath the towering spires on my bucket list-quest to see desert bighorn sheep in the wild, I’ve wandered among the petrified wood fragments scattered in the desert sand, so many that I almost forget to appreciate them for what they are.
When Bruce Byers brought home a piece of petrified wood he inherited after his father died in 2012, he didn’t plan to make it the subject of a new area of research. His father had collected the hunk of rock in Bears Ears, Utah, in the 1980s and had long used it as a doorstop. But with the 210-million-year-old fossil newly situated in his home, something niggled at Byers. The ancient log looked to him like it had a fire scar (
below, on right), a wood growth formation that happens at the base of a tree in response to a low-intensity ground fire. A patch of live tissue under the bark is killed, and the tree grows scar tissue curled around the wound in response. Byers recalls, “I thought, ‘This is interesting. I’ve never heard of a fossil fire scar.’”