Peanut wood is a variety of petrified wood that is usually dark brown to black in colour. It is recognized by its white-to-cream-colour markings that are ovoid in shape and about the size of a peanut. It received its name from these peanut-size markings. It is a fossil gem with a very unusual history.
Peanut wood is found along the edges of the Kennedy Ranges, approximately 160 kilometers inland from the costal town of Carnarvon in Western Australia.
Peanut wood is an incredibly rare material with limited amounts being placed on the market due to the Australian Laws that prohibit it from being mined and only allowing material to be ethically collected.
Much of the peanut wood being sold today began its life as a conifer tree. When the trees died or fell down during storms etc, rivers carried them downstream to the inland ocean where shipworm (a marine clam) that love to eat wood would attach itself and within a few weeks could eat and excavate deep tunnels into the now softened wood.
Once the wood became waterlogged it would sink to the ocean floor, settle into the mud and the boreholes would fill with a light coloured radiolarian sediment and the petrification process begun. Peanut wood is over 112,000,000 years old and is dated back to the Cretaceous period.
Comments