2 Petrified Wood In Oklahoma Neil H. Suneson, Geologist IV, Oklahoma Geological Survey Adjunct Professor, ConocoPhillips School of Geology and Geophysics, University of Oklahoma
[email protected] / 405.325.7315 Introduction world’s most baffling puzzles, the bane of professional cryp- tologists and amateur sleuths who have spent 15 years trying In the fossil world, petrified wood may be second only to solve it” (www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jun/11/dan- to dinosaurs in its fascination to humans, and “wood turned brown.books, acc. 2/27/10). Kryptos is referred to twice to stone” probably has the longer history of the two. In fact, on the dust jacket of the U.S. version of Dan Brown’s novel a fossil cycad was placed in the tomb of the Marzabotto “The Da Vinci Code” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/kryptos, necropolis over 4000 years ago by the ancient Etruscans. It acc. 2/27/10). was accompanied by other funerary objects and thus must have had some special significance. Furthermore, it appears that the trunk of a fossil cycad may have been used by Ne- olithic people as a sharpening stone (Wieland, 1916) and thus may have “the longest known history of any fossil” (from www.plantapalm.com/vce/intro/historicalperspec- tive.htm, acc. 2/27/10). Around 1000 A.D. the Persian as- tronomer, chemist, mathematician, physicist, scientist, theologian, and philosopher Avicenna suggested “that or- ganic materials might be ‘turned into stone by a certain min- eralizing, petrifying power … and this transmutation of the bodies of animals and plants is just as short a step as the transmutation of waters.