This reminds me of a visit to the Burgess Shale back around 1982. It just happened to rain during our visit (not unusual in British Columbia, I'm sure), bringing the Shale's myriad fossils into high relief. We were visibly _surrounded_ by thousands of half billion year old critters. Unforgettable.
I felt an electric shock when I realized the size of it -- 43 feet in circumference and 16 feet across.
This is an interesting measure. A circle with diameter of 16 would have a circumference of 50. For an ellipse with a wide dimension of 16, the short dimension would be 11.2 to have a circumference of 43. I wonder why the tree grew in such an odd shape. Was it double-trunked? The image references were broken when I accessed the article.
The Wayback Machine has a low resolution photo. Looks like it might have a trunk split way up there?
While looking at pictures of fossils or even physically handling fossils that others have found is interesting; for me it was a completely different experience personally discovering some of them 'in the wild'.
I was exploring an area known for fossilized turtle shells (and found some of them) when I discovered a group of about a dozen fossilized tree trunks. You could clearly see the base of each tree and where it stood in relation to the others. Awe inspiring.
When I was passing through the area a couple of years ago, I took a side-trip to view the fossils - the persons in charge of the property were willing to let me onto the site.
I doubt this is likely to encourage a great many people to make this trip, but just in case it does, and this would be unwelcome, I won't disclose the exact location.
It's quite a bit farther north but Isle La Motte in the Champlain Islands has two quarry sites turned into state parks where you can wander over fossil beds for hours. I really enjoyed visiting. Sounds like these are from nearly the same epoch.
Indeed - I figured it out from photographs of the site and a large free online mapping service, and I am nowhere as good at this sort of thing as that guy. What I'm saying is that you can go see it if you are not too far away and put a bit of effort into it.
Is there a directory of old growth forests in North America somewhere? I'd love to visit a few and visually compare them to more familiar forests assumed to be mature and wild, but actually are undergoing secession given the extensive deforestation here over the past 500 years. What does a forest of mature oaks really look like?
