From the May 2002 Scientific American Magazine | 0 comments

Trees of the Triassic ( Preview )

In the Painted Desert of Arizona, a story of how forests turned to stone and how the stones are walking away

By Marguerite Holloway

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2002 Issue
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The land and its trees are yellow, pink, putty, purple, periwinkle, orange, gray, lichen green and the green of young grass. White, too, if there is a sprinkling of snow. And the colors, those of the land at least, are always changing--flat in midday, deep and glowing at sunrise and sunset. But the trees are unchanging, stranded on mesas or hillsides or washes, broken and beautiful, made of stone.

The Painted Desert is part of Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, and both are part of a landscape that today is sere and denuded but that 225 to 220 million years ago was lush and swampy, thick with towering conifers and busy with crocodilelike creatures and small dinosaurs. When the trees fell, they were buried under mud, and over millions of years silica from volcanic ash percolated through the water and covered and then hardened them.

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