I’m thrilled to introduce the latest nearly magical fossil treasure straight out of the Sticks in Stones Lapidary rockshop! The combination of wood preservation, agate color and agate lined vugs in this magnificent slab are not quite like any other log I’ve seen from this petrified forest. The color looks, quite literally, like an explosion captured in stone! Burning black, orange and smoky gray shades preserve this 200 million year old fossil Araucaria tree in perfect detail. This is a medium-large sized, beautiful and very unique round cut from the center of a choice petrified wood log from Madagascar. This gorgeous fossil beauty actually has some of the prettiest natural shades preserving the delicate fossil wood grain you’ll see from this forest!! The display face is ground flat and mirror polished in our shop to produce a true collector piece of unparalleled quality! This gorgeous, absolutely choice petrified wood round is the latest in a series of really nice, very colorful rounds that we’ve prepared in our shop with world class finishes to produce true collector quality specimens that put the imported pieces other dealers offer to shame. I met a new miner several years back that brought some petrified logs in from this distant island nation and what he had was by far the best I’d seen in many, many years – enough so that I travelled there myself to select several tons of the nicest cutting material I’d ever seen from this distant fossil forest. We’ve cut some amazing pieces and made some great contacts as a result of this significant cash and time investment. But this particular slab is not from a log we cut, but was rescued from a pile of poorly prepared slabs we found with one of the bigger importers from this region. I had briefly looked through a pile of slabs that had been polished in Madagascar just to get a feel for what the logs this dealer had might produce and a small pile of slabs from this log caught my eye for obvious reasons. The color and wood grain is really special in this piece, and despite the cost, I decided the specimens produced would be worth refinishing these slabs for. It’s a lot more expensive for me to re-work a poorly finished slab than it typically is for me to start with a log and cut it myself. While I save the cutting time, The grinding time to make a lumpy hand ground finish flat again takes many times longer than it would to actually cut it smooth with a saw in the first place. And the material is many times the price of a rough log once it’s been “finished” in the local shops. But despite these drawbacks, this piece was so exquisite that I decided I must take it home and work it properly and now that I have it in hand, I’m glad I did! I’ve ground the stone flat again and polished it to a much higher quality lustre than you find on the imported varieties. You can compare my finish on the display side to the import finish that is still on the back of this slab to see how well we back that boast! Even if you already have Madagascar wood in your collection, you owe it to yourself to see how nice these ancient treasures can be when properly prepared! This wood takes an extreme polish that looks just fabulous. It has a ton of detail and some of the nicest colors I’ve ever seen in petrified wood (and considering what we usually have on hand this is saying a lot). The checkerboard interior is nicely accented with a huge variety of colors all swirled with other natural tones that preserved the fibrous wood cell structure from this ancient tree fossil very well. The heart is clearly visible and there are some crystal filled cavities that penetrate the surface. It’s a striking Madagascar wood round sure to enhance any collection! It’s just amazing how beautiful petrified wood can be and this fine specimen found halfway around the world shows to what lengths people will go to bring these treasures to market! If you don’t own a top grade piece form this increasingly important deposit yet in your own collection, this is your chance. This is a nearly perfect round cut from the center of a nice sized log. This stone has been professionally polished on a special lap that produces a flat face and a mirror perfect shine. The polish really is liquid perfect – a difference in the quality products Sticks-in-Stones has built its reputation on! It measures about 8 3/4″ x 8 1/2″ in diameter. It’s cut about 0.55 thick. The item “SiS NEW COLOR EXPLOSION Madagascar Petrified Wood Slab IMMACULATE POLISH” is in sale since Tuesday, October 8, 2019. This item is in the category “Collectibles\Rocks, Fossils & Minerals\Fossils\Vegetation\Petrified Wood”. The seller is “rockshop” and is located in Beaverton, Oregon. This item can be shipped worldwide.