Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 November 1892 — A Forest of Petrified Trees. [ARTICLE]

A Forest of Petrified Trees.

F. B. Schemerhorn, geologist of the Idaho World’s Fair Bureau, who recently discovered the great glaciers in Idaho county, has found a fossil forest in the center of Custer county. In the same locality he has discovered the petrified bones of a now extinct race of men and animals, which will be sent to Chicago. The forest covers an area of four square miles and the condition of the ground shows that at one time an enormous flow of clay which worked in from the northwest has buried the tree trunks to a great depth. The clay has turned to stone and no one can ascertain its tiue depth without going to great expense. All the trees in this forest have their tops broken off and stand from ten to forty feet above the ground, averaging about twenty-eight to the acre. Schemerhorn took the exact measurement of some of the trees and found them to average twelve feet in diameter on top and sixteen feet in diameter at the surface of the ground. How far the trunk reached through the clay stone to the soil he had no means of ascertaining. A branch which hud become detached from a tree and was lying about sixteen feet from it was three feet in diameter. From the size of the trees and branches Mr. Schemerhorn thinks they are a species of redwood such ns is found in California, and attributes their fossilizntion to the clay, which, bearing a large part of minend and presumably coming from some volcano, soon turned the living trees into monuments of stone. —[San Francisco Examiner.