TEREDO BORED DRIFTWOOD polished petrified wood

Description

Teredo bored driftwood (Incertae sedis)
Saltos Shale Member, Monterey formation  Middle Miocene
Santa Barbara Canyon, near Cuyama, California
Here's a very handsome slab of petrified wood with multiple borings from teredos.  The Saltos Shale is mostly marine strata that intertongues with the Lower Miocene mixed marine and terrestrial, Vaqueros Formation.  We have offered Vaqueros wood in our inventory in the past and it (of course being terrestrial) never has any teredo tunneling.  On the other hand, the Vaqueros wood usually has well-preserved wood structure.  In contrast, the Saltos Shale wood does not have preservation of wood anatomy but the fact that it 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.  A couple of them are lined with a thin veneer of chalcedony and a one of them has tiny quartz crystals lining the cavity.  The so-called teredo worms are not worms at all; they are gastropods. Their shells have become extremely diminished 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 where all of the borings are parallel to the axis of the tree.  A great science story and a decorative slab!  It measures 6" x 4.25" on the polished face and it is 5/8" thick.
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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