Wood Into Stone: The Amazing Science of Petrified Wood

A tree falls in a forest millions of years ago and never rots. Instead, it slowly transforms into sparkling crystal. Here's how that actually happens.

Pick up a piece of petrified wood and your brain does a double-take. It looks like wood. It has rings, bark texture, and the grain you'd expect from a log. But it feels like a rock, because it is a rock. Every bit of the original tree has been swapped out for minerals, atom by atom, over an almost unimaginably long span of time. The result is one of nature's most stunning geological magic tricks, and the science behind it is genuinely fascinating.