Created by Nature - Made by Man

	Petrified Wood Table F1406-028

It is 107 degrees Fahrenheit deep in the Japanese jungle with humidity off the charts. You are working at an excavation site and the clothes you are wearing are so laden with sweat it feels like you are in body armor. This place is not exactly hospitable. In your hand is a pick-axe.  A brush and trowel are in your back pocket and other archaeology tools lay nearby; except where you are standing is not an archaeological dig. Beneath the surface is a coniferous forest – now petrified - blown apart 330 million years ago when this area was nothing but volcanoes and trees. So prevalent here, petrified wood is considered a natural resource; yet so difficult to access, it is nothing less than buried treasure.

Petrified Wood Table F1406-028

This week’s New Arrival features a petrified wood table. Once part of a tree, it was buried in the ground after the eruption of an unknown volcano when Indonesia was part of a giant land mass known as Pangaea. In the amount of time it took for this piece to petrify, Pangaea shattered to become the modern continents, the earth cooled and reheated multiple times, mass extinctions came and went, and the road to humanity was yet to be paved. In fact, this piece petrified long before our ancestors ever took their first upright steps, a ridiculously short 200,000 years ago. Yet, it took human ingenuity to discover how nature could crystallize wood, and how such treasure could become functional.