103g Petrified Wood – Heartbeat under Stone

When the nymph Daphne fled from Apollo and her powers waned, she pleaded with her father, the river god Peneus, for rescue. So Ovid tells it in his Metamorphoses: heavy stiffness seized her limbs, a thin rind enclosed her chest. Her hair became leaves, her arms branches, her once-swift feet roots. Only her radiance remained to her. Yet when Apollo laid his hand on the trunk, he still felt her heart beating beneath the new bark. Since then the laurel has been his sacred tree. This skull carries one more transformation within it: from wood to stone. In the bright white, the tree rings are distinctly drawn, and they run through the entire skull. Even in the red face they shimmer beneath the surface, like that heartbeat beneath the bark. Over it, the red lays itself in its own opposing bands, crossing the rings. Thus from the tree’s quiet order emerges a true explosion of variety. Order and color here have different origins. In the petrification, silica replaced the wood’s cell walls so precisely that even the annual rings remained intact. The color, by contrast, came from iron-containing solutions that followed their own paths through the rock. Therefore the red runs across the annual rings as if it had never learned the tree’s structure. Material: petrified wood, silicified (softwood of the Araucarioxylon type) Origin: Madagascar Dimensions: 5.1 x 3.9 x 3.3 cm Weight: 103 g Special features: Clearly preserved growth rings that run through the entire skull and also shimmer beneath the red facial area; red iron-oxide banding crossing the wood’s structure; at the back of the head a flattened zone where the trunk’s structure openly emerges

Estimate:$1.12

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