Establishment of Petrified Forest National Park

Petrified Forest National Park lies in northeastern Arizona and is known for its large deposits of petrified wood, fossilized trunks from trees that lived in the Late Triassic period, more than 200 million years ago. The logs were buried by sediment and replaced by minerals such as quartz, which produced the bright colors seen today. The park also includes part of the Painted Desert, with its banded badlands, and it holds fossils of early dinosaurs and other Triassic animals. People lived in the area for thousands of years, leaving petroglyphs and the remains of villages such as Puerco Pueblo. The area was first protected as a national monument by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, and the old Route 66 once ran through it.

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