“Therapsids were reptiles that mammals eventually developed from. Some were vegetarians and some were carnivores.” He examined the skull, the teeth jutting from it. “Look at these canines and incisors, this one was a carnivore.”
There were more bones scattered about. Lots of them. McNair identified some belonging to fish and others from therapsids, some quite large and others from smaller rodent-like forms. He went on and on in dusty detail about life in the late Permian and the massive extinction that wiped most of it out.
“This area must be part of some ancient headland,” he said. “Where the sea met the land. Incredible. We’re probably standing on a beach from the Upper Permian.”
Breed got bored and wandered off by himself. He disappeared over a rise and they could see his light bobbing about.
“Hey!” he called out. “There’s pillars over here.”
That got everyone scrambling to take a look.
They all arrived about the same time and saw an uneven expanse of ground stretching away as far as their lights would reach. It was set with low mounds and sloping hills. And everywhere…pillars. Not just two or three, but hundreds stretching away in all directions. Some were narrow like pipes and others had very wide bases that gradually tapered as they moved up and up, many right into the living rock far above. They were set in stands, crowded together so tightly you would have had to turn sideways to get between them, while others occupied low hillocks above.
McNair started moving around them, touching them and muttering under his breath.
Boyd moved with him, puzzled by what he was seeing. When Breed said “pillars” he was thinking of something out of classical architecture, Doric columns and the like. But these were nothing like that. Their surfaces were rough and set with overlapping scales and sometimes little thorns. It all reminded him of the skin of pineapples.
“They look kind of like trees,” he finally said.
“They are trees,” McNair said, nearly breathless with it all. “Permian trees. Good God in heaven, a forest of trees, still rooted, still in their upright living positions after 250 million years.”
Breed and Maki just looked at each other.
“Doc,” Breed said, knocking on one of them. “They’re made of stone.”
“They’re petrified,” Boyd said. “Just like those bones. They’re fossils.”
“Exactly,” McNair said.
All of them got the significance of it now: a forest of prehistoric trees.
And there had to be hundreds of them.
As they explored around, they found some that were no taller than a man and others that must have been eighty feet when they were alive, and still others that were probably hundreds of feet that disappeared right into the rock overhead. Some were just trunks, others had been snapped off thirty feet up, petrified logs and branches and deadfalls lying about. But many were nearly intact, their limbs still extant. Not only had the trees themselves been fossilized, but the loam around them. Heaps of fallen leaves were as petrified as the trees they fell from.
Boyd found it hard to take it all in, that immense, maze-like run of trees like the masts of ships.
Maki just didn’t get it, though. “How does a tree turn to rock?”
Breed said, “It’s like out in Arizona, the Petrified Forest. I been there. Ain’t you ever heard of that, Maki?”
“Oh yeah, sure.”
McNair told them that the trees in the Petrified Forest in Arizona were from the Triassic, but what they had here was much older. Much, much older. In Arizona, some of the trees were still rooted as these, but many had been washed by prehistoric seasonal floods into sandy river channels where they were buried in gravel and sand rich in volcanic ash.
“The process is called permineralization,” McNair explained. “I imagine this entire area was in some sort of lowland swamp or valley during the Permian. A flash flood probably turned that valley into a bog or a muddy lake. Hence, oxygen which causes oxidation and rot, was kept away. These trees were buried in water and sediment. What happens next is that the trees either disintegrate or are compressed into coal over a period of millions of years, or, in this case, they permineralize. Minerals gradually replace the woody tissues and you have petrified trees.”
Breed said, “Yeah, but this is better than the Petrified Forest. A lot better.”
“Yes. Yes, it is. This entire forest must have been locked in that bog and the entire thing, through the passage of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years must have dried up, but the sediment that enclosed it turned to stone, capturing our forest as we now see it. Nearly intact.”
McNair said that much later, whatever geologic upheaval swallowed up the Permian strata and sank it deep into Precambrian rock, brought the forest here as well. Through the ages, waters must have eroded the rocks away and exposed what they were seeing now.
Maki was interested. “There’s nothing like this anywhere? Not even Arizona?”
McNair shook his head. “A few years ago, a nice stand of petrified Permian trees were discovered near the Beardmore Glacier in Antarctica. But nothing like this.”
Some of them rose up out of the rock on spidery tangles of fossilized roots and others had trunks so huge that three men could not have circled them with their arms. McNair said there were both conifers and deciduous trees in this forest. They were looking at cycads and gymnosperms and seed ferns, an amazing variety. He pointed out short trees with fern-like fronds that were called Archaeopteris, the progenitors of modern pines. Something called a Dicroidium that looked more like a large houseplant than a tree. There were primitive Ginkgoes with broad, fanlike leaves, cycads that looked much like palm trees, and Glossopteris, another seed fern, but very treelike in appearance. This species had a massive trunk that tapered gradually upward maybe fifty or sixty feet where a cluster of whipping branches sprouted. The huge, broad leaves in the rock were Glossopteris leaves, McNair said.
He squatted next to a wide stump, examining the rings within which were bright and sparkling with mineral deposits of many colors. “Look here,” he said. “If I had a mass spectrometer, I could identify these minerals, but I’m prepared to make a guess. Much of this is quartz, but the various trace elements give the petrified wood its color. Copper and chrome oxide create greens and blues, iron oxide gives us reds and browns and yellows, aluminum silicates produce whites, etc. etc.”
Boyd, for one, was ignoring the lecture.
It was interesting stuff and any other time he might have listened intently, but not down here. Not in the bowels of the earth in the enshrouding darkness with nothing but the sound of dripping water and echoing voices to break that heavy, almost humming silence. This place was like some graveyard and he honestly did not like it. It was meant to stay buried and he wished to God it had. He panned his light around, all those fossilized tree trunks leaning and canting this way and that, clustered together, crowded like the spokes of bike tires. The flashlight beam created sliding, distorted shadows and made the trees look like they were in motion. More than once, he was certain that something had moved out there in that cemetery of pillars and monuments.
It was imagination. It just had to be.
Yet, that feeling in his guts was expanding, filling him with an oily blackness, drowning him in his own mounting claustrophobia and paranoia. This place had not known light or air in eons and the idea of that disturbed him in ways he could not adequately catalog. Like maybe this hermetically sealed graveyard might start waking up at any moment, unleashing all its terrible secrets after 250 million years.
That was crazy, of course.
But as he wiped sweaty dew from his brow, he could not dismiss it entirely. Because ever since they’d reached the petrified forest he’d had the feeling that they were being watched.
9
Twenty minutes later-after climbing through those close-packed trunks, navigating petrified logs, and fields
