Petrified Palm Root with Chalcedony (Recent Find)

Item Description

This stone comes to us from a fairly recent find (March of 2021). It's a very attractive, good sized polished stone of rarely seen petrified palm root (Arecaceae) from Garut in West Java, Indonesia. Arecaceae are defined as tropical trees usually having a tall columnar trunk bearing a crown of very large leaves; coextensive with the order Palmales. This material is distinctly different from old petrified palm that we've seen from Indonesia in the past. It should be noted that this is more of a pseudomorph in my mind as, this is actually a replacement of the wood by cryptocrystalline Quartz (Chalcedony). During the replacement process, tree trunks were buried under several hundred yards of sediment. Over the course of time the wood was replaced by Chalcedony which was carried in underground waters. Due to the slow steady process, even the most minute details of the woody structure was preserved. This "Oval Cabochon" cut gem features beautiful patches of soft blue and white Chalcedony in the space between the cells of the tree root. You can see the "grain" of the wood (the darker colored portions of the gem), and they make a great contrast against the Chalcedony. The stone actually passes a very small amount of light when strongly backlit on the edges. If you collect unique stones in the Quartz family, don't miss out on this one, as it's really eye-catching and different!