Wood Older Than the Hills 



By Arthur Koehleh 

 Expert in Wood Identification, Forest Products Laboratory, Madison, Wisconsin 



SPECIMENS of wood, which 

 are veritably older than 

 gome hills, have recently 

 been unearthed in a railroad cut 

 at Woodville, in St. Croix Coun- 

 ty, Wisconsin. The wood, some- 

 what mixed with black soil, was 

 found in a layer four to twelve 

 inches thick in the base of a hill 

 fully fifty feet high. 



Some fragments of the wood 

 were sent by Mr. S. Weidman, 

 of the Wisconsin Geological 

 Survey, to the Forest Products 

 Laboratory, Madison, Wiscon- 

 sin, for identification. The wood 



was very brittle and much distorted, most of the cells 

 being flattened. However, by cutting thin sections of 

 the wood and viewing them through a microscope, the 

 characteristic structure of the cells could be made out. 

 The wood proved to be spruce. 



Geologists explain the occurrence of the wood so far 



: : /:-:'^-: ; :^:Y//^-^ 



WHERE 500,000 YEAR OLD SPRUCE WAS FOUND 



.Note section of this diagramatic sketch of a railroad cut near Woodville, Wisconsin, marked in the 

 sketch "Oid Forest Bed." It was in this bed that specimens of the spruce, estimated to be 500,000 

 years old, were found. The explanation of how they came there is given in this article by Mr. Arthur 

 Koehler, of the Forest Products Laboratory, Madison, Wisconsin. 



under ground something like this : Ages ago a thick sheet 

 of ice (glacier) covered the greater part of the State of 

 Wisconsin and neighboring States, and moved slowly 

 southward. Heavy masses of ice will "flow" in the same 

 manner in which a brittle piece of molasses candy will 

 gradually spread out on a plate. At the end of the 



CROSS SECTION OF SPRUCE 500,000 YEARS OLD 

 Thi. i photomicrograph ..f spruce, magnified at 50 diameters, found in 

 a glacial drift in WlKonsin. It grew there, expert geologists esti- 

 mate, about half a million year, ago. Most of the cell walls are 

 wrinkled, although a few 

 retained their normal tbape. 



<>2 



tv. .hum ui i iic ten wuns arc 

 a Inch were infiltrated with limestone 



CROSS SECTION OF NORMAL, SPRUCE 



Photomicrograph of present-day spruce. Note the difference between it 

 and the prehistoric specimen recovered from the glacial drift. Magni- 

 fied fifty diameters. 



