Petrified Horse, Stringtown, Oklahoma

[jeff of pa]

 

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[Red-Coat]

I love these old stories, but they're usually so difficult to follow up with respect to finding out what happened to the items mentioned, locating drawings or photographs. Sometimes you can find follow-up accounts in the old Smithsonian 'Reports to the Director' which often tell a different story from their 'expert' assessment.

You may be interested that 'petrifaction' is not an unknown thing and there are a number of locations around the word where limestone karst terrain in association with rivulets and streams creates the right conditions for it to happen in very short spaces of time. I wonder if that's what happened here? I visited a famous one in the UK a little while ago at Knaresborough in Yorkshire. The second picture shows a variety of olden-day hats that were left hanging where lime-rich water flows over an escarpment and ultimately completely permeated and encased them by carbonate deposition in a similar manner to stalactite formation.



For the amusement of tourists, they hang all sorts of things in the water to be petrified. Here you can see a child's toy dinosaur, a lobster, lots of teddy bears (which they sell in the gift shop after they have petrified) and a bunch of miscellaneous junk.





At one time you could pay a fee to leave your own items in the water and have them posted to you a few months later after they had petrified. It happened in as short a time as that. Celebrity visitors have donated items from time to time. Among the exhibits they have one of John Wayne's hats and a handbag donated by Agatha Christie.

 

[jeff of pa]

lol