Virtual Tour of the Johnston Geology Museum

STOP 2 - Petrified Wood

Petrified wood is fossil wood. It can exhibit a variety of colors and may contains small quartz crystals. Fossil wood is much denser than regular wood as a result of the fossilization process. If you were able to handle a piece of petrified wood you would know it’s a fossil by its weight. When viewing the samples in this display, note the fine-scale preservation of the wood’s original cell structure in some of the specimens. (Full disclosure- these are some of the only samples in the museum that are not from Kansas. You can learn of their origin in the display).

Question #3: What two types of fossil preservation are shown by the fossilized wood?

Question #4: Why so some samples contain different colors?