TEREDO BORED DRIFTWOOD from Santa Barbara County, CA polished petrified wood

Description

Up for your consideration is a very handsome slab of petrified wood with multiple borings from teredos.  It is from Santa Barbara Canyon, near Cuyama in Santa Barbara County, California and it comes out of the Middle Miocene Saltos Shale Member of the Monterey Formation.  This mostly marine strata intertongues with the Lower Miocene mixed marine and terrestrial, Vaqueros Formation.  Both of these strata contain petrified wood but the fact that the Saltos Shale wood is severely bored by teredos is a good indication that wood in this strata must have floated into an embayment with flood waters and spent considerable time in the water, providing a happy home for the so called teredo worms.   Some of the (quite large) borings are filled with mudstone and some are hollow.  Many of them are lined with a thin veneer of chalcedony and a few of them have tiny quartz crystals lining the cavity.  The so-called t
eredo worms are not worms at all; they are gastropods.  Their shells have become extremely diminuitive to the point that they live entirely outside of their shell (in their tunnels), opening and closing the now very tiny bivalve shell to literally gnaw their way through the waterlogged and thus softened wood.  In the early days of seafaring before the invention of iron boats (or the replacement of wooden pleasure craft with fiberglass hulls) the teredos were much hated by sailors who were forced to pull their ships out of water frequently to scrape off the critters before they bored tunnels through the wooden hulls.   I've always been amazed that the individual teredos are able to avoid crossing any other individual's track.  They almost always exhibit parallel travel patterns as is the case in this specimen wherein all of the borings are parallel to the axis of the tree.  This slab measures
approximately
6" x 5" (longest chords) and it is 5/8 inches thick.  This specimen is a polished half round - the other half was likely totally consumed by the teredos!
We specialize in petrified wood and plant fossils which are accurately identified as to locality of origin and family, genus or species. We don’t guess and when we don’t know, we say so! Your specimen will come with a label identifying the specimen, the locality where it was collected, the formation and age of the material and any other pertinent information we have gleaned from our literature search.
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