Amateur Discovery

During the hiking part of the weekends adventure I came across these strange rocks in an area that had a coal bed sitting on it before. The removal of the coal and a little bit of erosion had uncovered these rock formations.

Just from some basic observations I’m guessing this is a petrified tree root system - millions of years old. There are a few things that make me think this - the first is the obvious texture of the rock. Another aspect is that it is oval shaped and independent of the surrounding rock formations. The oval shape really adds weight to my theory because it would be oval shaped if it had once been round. After millions of years and everything settling on top, it would have compacted the root into this oval shaped rock.

You can tell from the broken pieces all along it’s form that it had had heavy traffic on it recently. I would love to find a long piece intact and had even thought about going back for these that are broken. I did bring two pieces of it home. I’m hoping to find out what it is and how old.

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Adding - It would appear as if I was correct in my assumption that what is pictured is the remains of a tree root system 286 - 360 million years old. I emailed a professor at WVU and the following is his reply.

It indeed looks like the root system of a Pennsylvanian tree. It is known as sigillaria. The pictures are great! Next time, be sure to place something for scale - a pen, a ruler, a notebook, for example so that the full scope of the find can be determined. You have a sharp eye and you used good common sense to figure out what you must have seen. Well done!

The following from here.

Sigillaria is the generic name assigned to this ancient arborescent lycopod. It had leaves and roots very similar to its contemporaneous cousin, lepidodendron, but it differed in that it exhibited much rarer branching and its tall, columnar trunk lacked the scale-pattern of lepidodendron, instead exhibiting straight, fluted furrows along the trunk midsection. Occassionally the trunks were smooth.

Other differences with lepidodendron were its cones. Lepidodendron cones were attached individually near the tip of it’s branches. Sigillaria cones occurred in clusters attached in certain places along the upper stem.

Another characteristic of sigillaria are the vertically-arranged circular scar pattern found in fossil specimens representing the inner bark. These scars called parichnos occur in specimens assigned the form-genus name of Syringodendron.

Sigillaria was prolific during the Carboniferous Period (360 to 286 million years ago) and, like its cousin lepidodendron, often attained heights of over 130 feet.