![]() That was not so easy because of the volume and diversity of fossil wood at the site. To figure out the types of trees that had been growing in the forest before the eruption, we needed thin samples of the petrified wood that could be studied under a microscope. Credit: Mariah Slovacek/National Park Service, CC BY-ND Petrified wood under a microscope The tree key from Sexi, Peru, with cross-sections of the wood. It is helping paleontologists like us to understand the history of the megadiverse forests of the New World tropics and the past climates and environments of South America.īy examining thin slices of petrified wood under microscopes, we were able to map out the mix of trees that thrived here long before humans existed. This petrified forest, El Bosque Perificado Piedra Chamana, is the first fossil forest from the South American tropics to be studied in detail. Millions of years later, after the modern-day Andes rose and carried the fossils with them, the rocks were exposed to the forces of erosion, and the fossil woods and leaves again saw the light of day. ![]() Then flows of ashy material moved through, breaking off the trees and carrying them like logs in a river to the area where they were buried and preserved. From there, we began to piece together the story of the forest, starting from the day 39 million years ago when a volcano erupted in northern Peru.Īsh rained down on the forest that day, stripping leaves from the trees. We started by dating the rocks and studying the volcanic processes that preserved the fossils. When we first visited these petrified trees more than 20 years ago, not much was known about their age or how they came to be preserved.
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