Ancient Log Provides Botanical Bonanza

Excavators at a sand and gravel pit near Brandywine thought the dark gray clay was rather strange looking, but their curiosity grew when their drilling equipment struck a log 25 feet down.

“For the operator to strike a piece of wood that deep in the ground seemed strange to me,” said John Frazee, who supervises pit-drilling at the Brandywine site for E. L. Gardner Inc.

“There was this dark gray clay, which we’ve never hit before. When we hit that tree, that’s what really got me curious. It just seemed odd, straight wood that deep in the ground,” Frazee said in recalling the discovery last October.

Bald Cypress

The operators called in geologists, who after testing determined that the 15-foot piece of wood was a bald cypress log about 5 million years old.

Geologists also recovered fossil materials indicating about 40 different types of plants--many of which now grow only in eastern Asia, said Scott Wing, a botanist and geologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History in Washington. Also found were fossil seeds, fruits, leaves and even pollen preserved by the clay.

The discovery is the first of its kind for botanical fossils that old in the eastern United States, Wing said. He said the find “fills in a gap” on fossil discoveries on the East Coast. Finds in the region have ranged from 1 million years old to more than 30 million years old, he said.

State Geologist Kenneth Weaver said preliminary tests show that the log, which is 3.5 feet in diameter, was a tree during the Upper Miocene-Lower Pliocene age.

Confirms Ideas

“What makes this discovery significant--in fact unique--to the scientific community is that this is the only known occurrence of woody material in deposits of this age in the mid-Atlantic states. And it confirms our ideas about the age of these deposits,” Weaver said.