Miocene petrified trees at Bahariya Oasis, Egypt
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GEOSITES
Miocene petrified trees at Bahariya Oasis, Egypt
A primary function of the cellular tissue in living wood is the conduction of liquid nutrients. This permeability favors possible fossilization of buried trees, when groundwater carrying dissolved elements results in precipitation of silica or other minerals as a filling material in open spaces and as a replacement for organic matter (Mustoe 2017). Fossil wood can be used to understand environmental conditions that allowed ancient plant communities to flourish. In Egypt, deposits preserving petrified wood vary in age from late Jurassic to Quaternary (El Saadawi et al. 2020). A spectacular locality lies in the Western Desert of Egypt, where large fossil logs are preserved in sediments bordering the Cairo-Bahariya Oasis Desert Road at latitude 29°41′41′′ N and longitude 30°19′23′′ E. Petrified wood occurs abundantly in the Lower Miocene Gebel El-Khashab Formation, which is composed mainly of loose, moderately to poorly sorted sands and gravel deposited by an ancient river. The fossil wood occurs as fragmented tree trunks that are found mingled or scattered on the sand surface or half-buried in
various orientations (El-Saadawi et al. 2014). Fossil logs range in length from 0.5 to 30 m, and include a variety of dicot taxa and two species of palms (see El-Saadawi et al. 2010). The predominance of woods with few, wide vessels is consistent with the warm, humid climate suggested for the early Miocene of the region. The presence of fossil palm logs is evidence that the Miocene climate was frost-free. Literatures suggest that the absence of other plant remains such as branches, roots and soft parts indicates that the wood fossilization occurred after long transportation from far areas in the south by the ancestral Nile River (Kortlandt 1980; Salama 2008; Sallam and Ruban 2017). The orientation of the petrified wood shows water flow direction at the time of deposition (Fig. 1). Finally, the proximity of these spectacular petrified logs to a public highway makes them an important geologic landmark for Western Desert visitors.
M. Elmahdy (*) Khalda Petroleum Company (KPC), Cairo, Egypt e-mail: munir.elmahdy@khalda‑eg.com; [email protected] M. Abioui Geo‑Environment and Geoheritage Group, Geology Department, Faculty of Sciences, Ibn Zohr University, Agadir, Morocco e-mail: [email protected] G. E. Mustoe Geology Department, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA, USA e-mail: [email protected] Received: 9 May 2020 / Accepted: 11 July 2020 © Geologische Vereinigung e.V. (GV) 2020
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International Journal of Earth Sciences
References El-Saadawi WE, Kamal El-Din MM, El-Faramawi W, El-Noamani ZM (2010) Fossil palm woods of Egypt III. A new site for Palmoxylon ascxhersoni Schenk and P. wadiai Sahni. Taeckholmia 30:145–159 El-Saadawi W, Kamal-El-Din M, Wheeler EA, Osman R, El-Faramawi M, El-Noamani Z (2014) Early Miocene woods of Egypt. IAWA J 35(1):35–50 El-Saadawi WE, Nour-El-Deen S, El-Noamani ZM, Darwish MH, Kamal El-Din MM (202
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