Object of the Month - Fossilised Wood

Harriet shares her object- Fossilised Wood

 Harriet, a University of Birmingham Student and previous Front of House member of staff at the Lapworth Museum of Geology, shares her favourite geological object, a piece of fossilised wood.

Transcript

Hi, I'm Harriet. My object of the month is this 220 million year old piece of fossilized wood that used to be a part of a tree. The reason I've chosen this as my objective of the month is because I did an environmental internship with the museum this summer, which was helping them be more sustainable, environmentally friendly. So, I thought I'd link that to my object of the month because I value trees and I think they're so important to our environment and to loads of ecosystems and that awareness should be brought to protecting them. And it's important to also realize the resilience of trees past and present. We can see like, this looks so beautiful and I think appreciating the beauty then can help us appreciate the beauty now and the importance of trees today. I also thought the object was really beautiful because we can see over time as it's fossilized as being so old, like 220 million years, it's formed these really beautiful crystals
from different colors, from the different oxides that are in the ground and in the soil from that time. But yet on the outside it still maintains the texture of like a tree. On the outside,if you didn't see this, you just would have no idea what was on the inside here. And just the beauty of the different crystals, the different formations, alongside the texture of the wood, which I think is something really special.

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