This very colorful petrified Araucaria wood plank is a true museum piece. It is “rip cut” (cut with the grain) from a well preserved conifer tree and is one of the single largest and most visually stunning examples of this type of display specimen I’ve personally ever seen, let alone produced! It’s a breath taking example of how beautiful petrified wood can be! The wood grain is just amazing and features particularly colorful, agate accented bands of colorful wood grain revealed throughout the entire mirror polished face! There are also veins of crystal exposed in the cut too and while the depth and richness of the color are hard to extract from the photo, in person it’s just almost unbelievable! This stone is polished to the same museum quality finish all of our work is prepared with and it truly represents some of the best of what Sticks in Stones Lapidary can provide to collectors and natural art lovers everywhere! This magnificent piece isn’t the typical Pacific Northwest treasure that we specialize in… It’s kind of a long story, but hey, this is a Sticks-in-Stones write-up after all :. I found a gentleman with several very colorful petrified logs from Madagascar a few years ago in Tucson. I was really taken by the material because it was so unusual for the location. Most of the Madagascar wood, though abundant, is very earth toned and doesn’t have a lot of pizazz – but these logs were clearly different, showing brilliant shades of green, red, violet and yellow in what were clearly well preserved, highly agatized logs. I picked through the lot and bought several and wow was I glad I did! They cut some of the nicest slabs and bookends I’ve ever cut from any wood anywhere! They were even better preserved than I thought, and in most cases the color improved as I cut deeper into the logs. And selected several more premium logs to work with in the shop. They’ll keep me busy for years, but you can bet I’m cutting the ones that show the most promise first and this is one of them! In this case, I cut a large sized, longer log section to produce one of the nicest Madagascar specimens you’ll likely ever see! Since we did the work ourselves, we were able to apply some of the craftsmanship we’ve learned over the years to avoid problems with flaked out fracture lines that are common in the imported specimens. I’ve also polished it to a much higher quality lustre than you find on the imported varieties. 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 colors revealed in this Araucaria log all swirled with other natural tones that preserved the fibrous wood structure from this ancient tree fossil very well. It’s a striking petrified wood artwork 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 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! This giant sized slab measures about 20 3/4″ x 9 3/4″ across the mirror polished face. It is cut about 0.90 thick. Weight is about 14 lbs. A nice, unique naturally wonderful stone collectible exclusively from Sticks-in-Stones Lapidary. This item is in the category “Collectibles\Rocks, Fossils & Minerals\Fossils\Vegetation\Petrified Wood”. The seller is “rockshop” and is located in this country: US. This item can be shipped worldwide.