How These Trees Turned Into Rocks (Petrified Forest Explained) 

I visited Petrified Forest National Park last year. Not only is the petrified wood abundant and absolutely stunning, but the landscape is so surreal. Multicolored badlands and striking formations. It definitely exceeded my expectations.

Retired geologist here. The sequence from 3:18 to 3:28 is not logs or fossils of any kind; it’s showing columnar basalt broken off. I don’t know where this is, but it’s definitely not the Petrified Forest area. Thanks for all your videos!

My wife and myself visited the park many years ago and it's stunning. I purchased a piece of petrified wood while there and it sits on my desk at home. It had been cut so you can see the gorgeous colors. I think it's so cool having something hundreds of millions of years old on my desk.

I did an extended trip to AZ a few years ago. My friend and I hit Petrified Forest, Monument Valley, and Grand Canyon. It was an amazing trip.

I visited in 2016 or 2017. It's a beautiful place. They do sell pieces of petrified wood found _outside_ the park. The building used to film the 1936 Humphrey Bogart movie, _The Petrified Forest_ is still there. 😊

I think crystalized petrified wood is some of the most beautiful & diverse rocks you can find. It's gorgeous. There is a awesome place here in Oregon where you can find it.

OMG THANK YOU DUDE! Foreal one of my favorite places and to hear it spoke on from one of my favorite channels is so cool! I loved the shout out, so thank you! Again, if you’re ever in Missouri, I have amazing and wonderful things to show you along our National Scenic River ways!

Petrified wood is one of my favorite minerals to go find. I’ve been to the petrified forest in Arizona once it was stunning my trip was cut short because it started to downpour and I had to leave. But it is the most amazingly colorful landscape of petrified wood

I appreciate the HP reference. I didn't realize that this used to be a rainforest...

I was there about 8 years ago and it was quite an experience. I also have a couple of pieces of petrified wood that I bought from the gift shop there. If you go there, try to see the Barringer meteor crater as well as both can be seen in one day.

I visited the petrified Forrest in 1976. My two young sons were with me. They allowed people to go look as you drove down a winding road. People were prohibited then from collecting any of the petrified wood,but they gave us a few small samples to take-home.

I’ve been there, the park rangers said what you see on the surface is only a fraction of what was, and is, there. Until it was protected millions of tons of the logs were taken. There are many more below the surface. The largest example is outside of the Smithsonian museum of natural history in Washington DC.

Growing up in the 60s and 70s my parents were Rockhounds and we would go to Oklahoma on vacation travelling down old Route 66 and yes I've been to the Petrified Forest many times its awesome and don't forget the Painted Desert which is nearby.

Petrified NPS is easily one of my favorite parks. Now that I live in Arizona, I usually make it a point to visit once a year and picking a different season. The unique desert landscape is just as fascinating as the petrified logs themselves. It's also just a peaceful feeling place, perhaps due to the vastness of the landscape. Now that I've watched this video, I'm already contemplating another weekend trip there to do more exploring.

Loved Petrified Forest! Such a unique experience compared to all the other national parks! Plus you have to stop and stand on the corner in Winslow Arizona haha

I'd like to see you do a video on/trip to the Dry Tortugas

I visited the Petrified Forest and close by the Painted Desert in 1982 when living in Las Vegas and working for Carson Broadcasting.

Fascinating and beautifully explained. I remember seeing a 6 foot section of a petrified tree with stumps of branches in a museum as a youngster and being very impressed but to see a whole 'forest' of them where they fell must be mind-blowing. Arizona just made my bucket list! Thanks for your hard work and for sharing.

I've been there with my wife and the petrified wood and local landscape are quite striking. We did a backcountry overnight there and we would definitely do it again. This is the first of your videos I've seen and it is really well done. I look forward to more!

I've collected petrified wood all over the west US, and petrified national park is not the only place with rainbow wood. You can buy this material from a neighboring ranch to the park, but one very popular spot for rock collectors is in Southern Utah. The wood is very similar and is rightfully named "Yellow Cat" because of its dominantly yellow colors, but may include a wide range of color (this is a public collecting area). Idaho is especially renowned for its petrified wood which is commonly found as precious opal, and there are open areas for collecting and privately owned mines which you can "pay to play". I've also found an incredible location with massive petrified trees scattered across the mesa at Dirty Devil Canyon (a North fork tributary of the Grand Canyon on BLM land), but it's very difficult to get to. Oregon and Washington have tons of petrified wood as well. My collection is saturated with petrified wood, but i would still say my favorite specimens are Arizona rainbow wood. Again, these are purchased at a neighboring ranch legally. I strongly recommend getting some while the getting is good. And yes, it's expensive. You'd be lucky to pay under $15/ pound with the average piece weighing upwards of 5 pounds. Small fragmented pieces might be cheaper, but owning a big chunk or 12 is always cool.

I know this is irrelevant to the discussion of how wood petrifies, but I'm struck by the beauty of one things, over time, turning into something equally beautiful and utterly different in composition.

Take nothing but memories, leave nothing but footprints.

Petrified Forest NP isn't the easiest park to get to but it is definitely worth the trip! I spent a few days at the park this spring and it is so much more than just the petrified logs, which are amazing! The Blue Badlands are other worldly, there is fantastic wildlife, ancient pueblo villages, and Route 66 history. Such a great park couldn't recommend it enough!

Great video, many blessings to you for making and sharing it. I have never been to any Petrified Forest, but I have been to a few forests that I was petrified in!!!

There are actually online sources and dealers on the side of the highways and interstates that can sell you pieces of petrified wood legally, as in not gathered from the park properties. But from private properties that they own or are in business with. There are even areas where you can see some parts of petrified remains from the highway like around the meteor crater area at winslow. Im a former truck driver and i found these shops and areas semiaccessible from I-40.

I drove through the Petrfied forest and the Painted Desert right across the Interstate a tunnel connects them in the early spring of 1989, was quite interesting.

Any chance you’d be curious about doing a video on why Sedona, AZ ISN’T a national park? With the same type of scenery as Zion and Bryce, I’m curious as to why it never became one, or even a state park for that matter. Anyways, great job on the content as always!

I would LOVE a series on some of the Arctic National Parks (and other lands). In particular, I'd love a video on Katmai NP. From the crazy amount of volcanoes in the park, to the catastrophic eruption of Novarupta, to Fat Bear Week, it's a park that's got a lot to talk about! And it's pretty obscure to most people outside Alaska. And like most of the parks up there (besides Denali and maybe Kenai Fjords), it's a bit of a challenge to access. It would be nice to learn about it in depth for those of us who have a slim chance of ever visiting.

Great video! Yes,I have been to the petrified forest ,I was in the Navy as a young 19 year old Seabee,driving across country to my next duty station. We stopped the spent some time there,it was an amazing experience. That was 1981. Petrified wood is very interesting to me now. I was living near White Salmon Washington,and hiking and camping in the Lewis River I found a few petrified chunks of rock. It was in the shallow river I was wading in,thought it was a burnt piece of firewood floating,but as I got next to it,it was on the bottom of the riverbed.Amazing find! After that,I started finding more ,possibly volvanic related,as this location in right in the middle of the Cascade mountain range?

Excellent information here.I learned something today.Thanks.

I visited this park a couple years ago. it was beautiful! I was happy to buy some rocks in the gift shop, and private landowners in the surrounding area had signs with it for sale. I hope that minimizes people stealing it

Once again an amazing video, for anyone who's interested in geography or nature in general, this channel is a gold mine. I'm a bit late to comment but what you could have mentioned is perhaps the other protected sites with petrified wood. I visited Petrified Forest NP when I was 13 and because we were in a hurry, we rushed the park and I didn't get to see much of it. I have visited other national parks or monuments where petrified wood can be found since, and I would like to mention two of those sites here. First was Theodore Roosevelt NP, which I think deserves its own video especially because of it's interesting history, where on certain trails we had walked past petrified pieces of bark and wood just scattered around, which was pretty unexpected since the northern unit to my knowledge didn't have any petrified forest trails. On the other hand there was I believe two trails that took you through two separate petrified forests with entire preserved stumps in the south unit. Those two trails are pretty remote, the only way to get there is to follow a specific path on gavel roads. The other site that I would like to mention is the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, which I believe has the largest petrified stumps in the world. In this case the petrified trees are an extinct species of sequoia, specifically Sequoia affinis. I myself am fascinated by big trees so when I visited and saw the petrified stumps for myself, I was honestly blown away. In my opinion it is a completely different experience to what you would see in Petrified Forest NP or other sites and I would definitely recommend it to anyone visiting Colorado.

Yes, I've been their twice and to satisfy that rock/fossil hound instinct and simultaneously support the park, I bought a few small slices from a store where there are rocks and slices with their beauty and mystery and thus preserving for future generations the awe of this place! Thank you for this video and may you have the experience of visiting yourself. SOme very cool photos you've shared of places I did not see, like the area with major amounts of fallen tree rocks atop one another. Well being!

We visited the park in '82 and it was great. Small area back then you had to hike to, but the trees were incredible to see and the landscape was surreal.

You did a really good job explaining that process. Thank you for your time and information. We live in pheonix and plan to visit soon.

The shot at 0:40 is on the Utah side of Monument Valley, not Arizona. Love ur vids

As an AZ native I can vouch that this park is definitely one of a kind. It has its own strange beauty. There is a gift shop that’s more of a museum that I’d highly recommend. It has all kinds of cool fossils along with wood. Also, it IS ILLEGAL to take “souvenirs” from the land, like he said. Definitely worth checking out! 👍

Didn't have much time to spend at the park but did enjoy it. The volunteer ranger kept an eye on us I asked him if it's alright to pick up small pieces. He said I could that it's illegal to take any. I seen the fence they had to put up around the black obsidian mountain in Yellowstone. One rock at a time, with a million or more people wanting some, it won't be preserved for future generations.

You should do an episode on the Blue Primitive Range on the Arizona/New Mexico border. It's a unique designation and could tie back into conversations about changing values, and preservation vs conservation.

Cool video! Live in AZ myself and have been there twice over the last two years; lastly in April this year. Best NP in the world. Such gorgeous scenery overall and the fossilised wood is sooooo amazingly beautiful.

I've been to this one in Arizona, but I've also been to one in the mountains of Colorado near Florissant, CO, which is a national park too. They both are pretty cool!

My grandparents owned property in western Texas and collected lots of petrified wood from it as they built it into a farm. I still own pieces of it. Saw the park just a few yrs ago. It is always amazing to visualize the great change land has made and continues to make far greater than anything man can do to it. It has shifted and continues to shift over time and geologic events.

Thanks for the awesome content and amazing videos!!!

Petrified forest is an underrated NP

I just returned from Arizona last night. That petrified forest was my favorite hike/observation. Sedona also beautiful to hike. Grand Canyon is just a must see in person for all humans! Page AZ also a must see with HorseshoeBend as well as Antelope Canyon. WoW's across the board!!!!!!!

The vastness of the forest is incredible. It was mind-blowing to see. I highly recommend a visit.

They do sell pieces of Petrified Wood, harvested in the areas surrounding the park, in the Park Gift Shop. You can also find PW along the road.

I dug out mine fires in Pennsylvania and my coworkers were incredulous about the fact that the Pittsburgh coal seam was formed 20 degrees below the equator!!! Great stuff!

200 million years ago! Amazing, fantastic, practically unbelievable. Petrified over millions of years!

I visited this park last spring, it was incredible.

I took my wife here and she didn't know what petrified wood was.... She thought I was crazy walking around taking pictures of chunks of wood! 🤣🤣

Fantastic information here as well as great editing. Beautiful pictures and well timed transitions

Wish they'd show this video at the park! Great explanation

I have been there and it is incredible. You can buy small pieces at the gift shop, which is what I did. Great video, really enjoyed it. Inspired me to look at my footage and revisit it.

I love the way it looks! I have some small pieces that have been polished and they are beautiful.

Thank you for this excellent, enjoyable and very informative, pro-grade presentation. Please keep up the excellent work! Many, many thanks.

Yes I have visited the part that surprised me the most was the size of the trees. Many were average size of 2 ft diameter but a few were nearly double that. Prepare for the heat if going in the summer or escape the winter for some 60-70⁰ F days during January-February. I also enjoyed the many desert lizards skittering along the old forest bones.

There is also Florissant national monument just outside Colorado Springs that has massive petrified redwood stumps

My grandparents had a lot of petrified wood they passed down to me and I use them as a liner around planter boxes

Could you possibly do a video on Ocmulgee Mounds NHP? It’s expected to be upgraded to a national park this year, and I feel like it’s a super cool spot to talk about :)

Where can we put video suggestions at?

Just north of the Petrified Forest is the Painted Desert, extending up to the Grand Canyon. Never been there since I was a kid, but I hear it is best accessed from the Petrified Forest NP. Arizona was once underwater, even here in the high North. A few miles from Tuba City, in the Dineh (Navajo) reservation, there is a locally run "dinosaur footprints" attraction. Okay, the large prints are rather silly outlines in stone of natural erosion, but there are plenty of hand-sized actual footprints, and one foot sized footprint, in what was certainly sediment long ago and is sandstone now.. A fairly recent controversy has sprung up over how the Grand Canyon came to be. Historically, the assumption was that the Colorado river carved its way down 5000 feet. The newer theory is that the land rose 5000 feet (as indicated by fossils) and the river just kept flowing.

I visited this park a couple of decades ago - as something of a way amateur armchair geologist, I loved learning about the petrified trees. I also remember thinking how sad it was that the park had to worry about folks making off with the fossils.

There are places along I-40 that are not within the park but still have many logs strewn about. I picked up a pair of bookends made from some of those logs (I assume) that are just gorgeous! It's truly an amazing place and simply cruising along the interstate, you can see them without actually entering the park itself.

These trees might be millions of years old, but it's true that petrification can happen VERY quickly and does not need to take anywhere near that long to happen. Just look up rate of petrification online. In nature it can be a few thousand years, and maybe faster.

What’s also really cool about petrified wood is you can actually split it just like firewood!

I screened this today and will be showing it to my 4th graders in class today. Very well done, thank you for your video.

I took my 13 year old son there in June of ‘23. You give a far greater explanation of how petrification happens than I was able! Thanks!

I drove through the Petrified Forst National Park back in 1973, the whole park road, and as I recall there were not many petrified trees visible from the road. My best advice to people after that was yes visit the park visitor center but that long, about 15 to 20 mile drive is not worth it.

I've learned the following (from the journal "New Scientist:") "Around 290 million years ago, several species of fungi evolved that could digest the main components of wood: cellulose, lignin and hemicellulose. One theory suggests that fossil fuels formed before these fungi evolved, but afterwards, plant material rotted and was returned to the carbon cycle." So, does the massive collection of the petrification have anything to do with the absence of these lignin-loving fungi?

I have a comment on the theft of the petrified wood. There were lots of claims that people did steal the wood. But the park service went back to pictures from 1964 when it became a park and they looked at the pictures and they verified all of the pieces and they came back and said that they were not stolen.

Drove through the park around 10 years ago beautiful interesting place. the museum on the east end of the park had fossils of the prehistoric animals that existed back then. Park had a mysterious vibe of an ancient primitive world. At least that was my perception.🤔 Also good to note the area where petrified wood occurs is much larger than the park boundaries I just viewed a 13-year-old video of a 320 acre parcel for sale with petrified wood everywhere

I'm from Borneo, central kalimantan part, we got mostly iron - oxide petrified wood on the acidic part of the forest (awesome but very weak), and normal silica on other mountains part of the island

Stumbled across your channel in a rabbit hole I took tonight after partaking in both drink and herb and really glad I found it. Subscribed

Still trying to wrap my head around how coniferous trees were able to spread by themselves without fire. In a tropical environment. Since conifers like sequoia is fire dependant. I think they got there through tree raft. Rafts of trees destroyed somewhere else and landed there. And subsequent flood/mud events covered the trees immediately to fossilize them. Mt St. Helens type eruptions could be the the a glance into how these trees were concentrated in one place.

They have bits of it all over Arizona, there’s a huge chunk in Mesa Arizona, just outside of Phoenix

Who wouldn’t want to pick up a piece of that beautiful petrified wood as a souvenir of their visit there?!!!

Crazy that, with enough time, and the right conditions, wood essentially turns into glass

I live in north Texas and I have petrified wood all over my property and I can easily find it after we have a hard rain.

Great job. As National Park lover I appreciate your work.

In 1973 my family drove an Rv there also we drove to the grand canyon, painted desert, meteor creator . The best vacation of my life

I live in Holbrook where the park is located. It’s a 15 minute drive and I’ve lived here since 1990 but have only been there once 😬

There's a petrified ginko forest in Washington. The 'trees' are more brown with less red tones. The ones out in the wild are in little concrete and metal cages/coffins like they're zoo animals to prevent theft. But you can touch the ones that are up by the visitor center.

Love this video and explanation. Now i know the process.

Unless I missed it I was hoping you would give even a rough estimate of how quickly a fallen log would have to be covered with silica in order to be able to go through the petrification process before it decayed. Are we talking laying there prior to being covered months, years, decades or longer?

Just visited today. Was looking for more info and poof, here you are. Thanks!

I have seen this stontrees in the Algeria Sahara exactly same looking. Thank you for detailed information

I am a geologist and i absolutely loved the park, was there late last year. A few things; 1: as far as I’m aware, it’s unlikely that these were buried by rivers as the rocks are mostly claystone. There are sandstone layers but they are laterally extensive and thus are likely not river deposits. These trees look a lot more like they were deposited within a flood deposit and quickly buried that way. 2: mineralization can be quite quick, with examples of organisms being completely mineralized within 5 years. It doesn’t have to take millions of years to replace the cells with quartz or calcite or opal or whatever else mineralizes. In fact, it’s likely that the process taking that long would still result in the tree mostly decomposing away. These probably didn’t take terribly long at all to mineralize. It’s incredibly cool and a park that a lot of people miss! Also, theft is not as big of a deal as everybody makes it out to be, i highly recommend visiting a museum at the south entrance where they have an exhibit discussing theft and the perseverance of the resources and enjoyment of the park. Take heart! Humanity has not yet been lost

This channel makes me happy.

I found a piece of petrified wood at the Colorado river in Arizona. It’s black and white, no iridescent colors but it’s pretty easy to see that it was wood.

Petrified wood is the state gem of Washington which also has a petrified forest 🌳

If I went to a place thats not like many others I would take a small piece with me also. It was a forest, and most forests have plenty of trees so I don’t see why if someone takes a small piece could be such a big deal. Everything has a story and that lil piece someone keeps could be great things to tell ur kids, grandkids, great grandkids so on and so forth about.

Logs look all the same age. It happened mostly all at once. The sheer volume points to this.

I was there in 1980. BEAUTIFUL. I suggest going to the Painted Desert as well.

Thank you for the video! I visited a petrified park in south Dakota a few months ago. I was going to share a pic but i dont see how

Really enjoyed this

early trees on earth did not decompose over time as you would expect wood to do, there was not yet any bacteria or fungi that had specialized into eating them yet. They where inedible, like glass and plastic.

It looks as though fairly heavy logging happened considering they're cut.

Hi i wanted to tell you loved your broadcast about Arizona. It is a great thing to hear about the history of the area. Hey I wanted to let you know that I have only recently just visited this area. The Petrified Forest has some of the prettiest most beautiful wood fossils anywhere. Arizona itself is also covered in all the other fossils that go along with that environment from that time too!! Every kind of little animal from that time period is also just laying there on the ground in so many pieces. Every rock I picked up was a little lizard head or a fish skull or a rib bone or a back vertebrae or a horn or a complete skeleton, or just completely visible imbedded in the rock EVERYWHERE!!! Every rock I looked at was a fossil of some kind. Also on top of being fossilized you can see the scorpions all over them!!(98%) I saw a shark fossil( shark like) the fin was so obvious when you compared it to a live version there was no denying. It was embedded in the same rock as a little Ray(stingray) right together. The shark was small and and the stingray, skate?(10 or 12 inches across the back) was also kinda little but when I saw them there in the same rock, I was really stunned. I didn't have a camera( of course) but they were facing each other and it was the fin on that shark like fish that was undeniable. Just unbelievble!!! I'm 61 and I love to look at all rocks. I don't know if it's just me but I'm from Washington state originally and I swear that I found a little petrified alligator head on Snoqualamie Pass along with some petrified baby turtles all in the same area on one day. Could you maybe tell me if that is, at all, a possibility???? Love this subject matter!!! Thanks!!;)

Awesome video!! I visited the petrified forest last year - I’m still dreaming about all the pieces I wouldn’t/couldn’t take 😂