Sabre52
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Me and my gal, Rosie
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Post by Sabre52 on May 6, 2014 17:24:52 GMT -5
Howdy folks, Since I see we have some new experts on cycads/wood here on the site now, I wanted to repost these pics for an opinion. As I've said before I've had like four different experts all give different opinions. All this stuff is agatized, though only a few example are this colorful. We do have confirmed cycads as close as Fredericksburg and do have a tiny bit of wood here on the ranch but this stuff seems fairly widely distributed. All Lower Cretaceous age around here......Mel   Here are a couple more less colorful examples. They runn to about football sized:   |
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Post by jakesrocks on May 6, 2014 21:18:42 GMT -5
Mel, the last pic does look like the internal structure of a Cycad. Does it have diamond shapes on the outer rind ? Cycads will show the diamond shaped attachment points of branches.
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Sabre52
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Me and my gal, Rosie
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Post by Sabre52 on May 6, 2014 22:42:42 GMT -5
Don, The exteriors all show a sort of diamond/ triangles/ fish scale like appearance. Shows pretty well in pic #3 above. The insides show kind of built up columnar/fan formations that have kind of layers in them but that might be due to the way silica infused the objects. That was what led one guy to say they were stromatolite but they really don't look like any other stromatolite I've seen. Stromatolites to me, seem to have more of a concentric type layering.....Mel
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bhiatt
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Post by bhiatt on May 6, 2014 23:12:30 GMT -5
Mel, looks like cycad to me but may be palm after I read this. I know it doesn't really look like the typical palm but go to google and type in texas petrified cycad. Under the search results click on the link, hexagonal fracturing in south texas petrified wood. Yours might be this. This is good read all the way through.
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bhiatt
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Post by bhiatt on May 6, 2014 23:23:29 GMT -5
well I don't know Mel. I guess the moral of the story of this article is that palm from south Texas sometimes has hexagonal fracturing that makes a pattern like cycad.
Yours shure does look like cycad to me though. This guys article is interesting though.
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Sabre52
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Post by Sabre52 on May 6, 2014 23:27:13 GMT -5
bhiatt: *S* I've read that article many times as I'm a big collector of Texas hexagonally fractured wood. That's is definitely not what this is. At this point I've cut a large amount of Texas hex wood so know it well. The markings in this stuff are never hexagons but rather diamonds or sometimes funnel shapes or triangles. I'll try to refind and photograph the hunk I saw while hiking the other day as it really shows the diamonds well as it was broken just inside the exterior rind. It was on an Indian site so I think maybe they were flaking spalls off it. It was dull colored so I didn't bother carrying it back to my jeep......Mel
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bhiatt
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Post by bhiatt on May 6, 2014 23:29:35 GMT -5
I should of known you knew about the hexagonally fractured wood.
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Fossilman
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Post by Fossilman on May 7, 2014 9:45:04 GMT -5
I would still take it home and cut it.........LOL
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Post by jakesrocks on May 7, 2014 11:11:36 GMT -5
I would still take it home and cut it.........LOL CUT IT ? NEVER !! If it is in fact a Cycad, it's worth a whole lot more as an intact specimen. |
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Post by gingerkid on May 7, 2014 11:50:34 GMT -5
Looks like a petrified pine cone to me. ? Do y'all have pine trees in Texas, Mel?
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Sabre52
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Me and my gal, Rosie
Member since August 2005
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Post by Sabre52 on May 7, 2014 16:18:47 GMT -5
Jan, There is pine pet wood in south Texas. Not sure if there were a lot of pines during the lower Cretaceous period. The south Texas wood is much younger than what we have here. Shape of larger specimens does not look cone like to me and the specimens ( usually all broken fragments) seem to be quite large for most cones.
Jake: I wish I would find a totally intact specimen as that might solve the mystery. All I find seem to be broken pieces of exterior material.....Mel
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Post by snowmom on May 27, 2014 17:42:10 GMT -5
mel, the top one looks like a different thing than the bottom two in the photos you provided. Does it seem that way to you when you compare them all? I think I have one like that "de-barked" for the most part, and Jugglerguy seems to have the same thing as well. He cut his and posted slabs in another thread. Doesn't that look a lot like when you slice a pineapple down vertically after you remove the skin? I have tentatively identified mine as something like a pineapple... probably not a cycad but a close relative and the stump of a primitive fern or if bromeliads were around then, a bromeliad( which is the family the pineapple belongs to).
I used to handle live cycads in a greenhouse job I had, and the two fossils in the bottom photos do indeed
look like the bark/husk of cycads I handled. Whatever they were, they were all over the world. I did a general search on fossil fruit and came up with a couple of pretty close matches in a couple of the images.
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