A lavishly illustrated guide to petrified wood, suitable both for the collector's reference shelf and for the coffee table. The author writes, "While a beautiful, well-silicified, gem quality, colorful branch of petrified wood is now a rock, it once was part of a tree — a tree that may have been growing in a distant forest over 200 million years ago. Some of these trees grew when the continents of the earth were joined into one. It is difficult to imagine the events that allowed these petrifications to occur and the forces that later allowed them to be unearthed. Each specimen has a story of its own."