Petrified Forest National Monument 1953

Petrified Forest National Monument, containing 85,304 acres of federally owned land, has the greatest and most colorful concentration of petrified wood known in the world. In the monument are six separate “forests” where giant logs of agatized wood lie prostrate, surrounded by numerous broken sections and smaller chips and fragments.

The area is a part of the Painted Desert of northern Arizona, a region of banded rocks of many hues carved by wind and rain into a fantastic landscape. Here and there beds of shale contain perfectly preserved fossil leaves of plants of a remote age. Occasionally the bones of giant reptiles and amphibians are washed from their burial places in the deposits