Now thats a rock!

[Rick P]

Tried to take my son Gunther fossil collecting today but the road in was washed out. We ended up hiking the creek bottom looking for root wood, got a good group of funky looking roots to turn but this one surprised me a bit when I turned it over.

 

[Ruby pen turning]

what is that, a rock that part of a tree grew around?

 

[Rick P]

The spring thaws always scour out a few trees so there is lots of root wood laying along the creeks in the spring, great time to collect since the water washes the dirt away. The pic is of a root that had grown through a gravel bed and in-cased a rock the size of a grape fruit! It is full of hollows and twists were it was forced to grow around rocks. There is a section that has a bunch of gravel embedded in it as well, I'll bet all told there are about 20 rocks stuck in this one root that you can see from the surface........it's sitting on my fireplace mantle now.