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Arts | Connecticut

From the Age of Dinosaurs, Hard Clues

David Blersch, with a piece of petrified wood from his 22-acre farm in Southbury.Credit...Andrew Sullivan for The New York Times

Of all the plants that can be found at David Blersch’s 22-acre farm on Horse Fence Hill Road in Southbury, the one that has drawn the most attention is as hard as a rock.

It is fossilized — petrified wood — and is now featured in the “Connecticut’s Petrified Forest” exhibition at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven.

The path that took Mr. Blersch’s wood to Yale started when a professor there happened across a piece of petrified wood believed to have come from Southbury and began to do some detective work. It led to the discovery of a new genus (or family) and species of conifer: a tree, now extinct, that grew 200 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed what is now New Haven County.

Mr. Blersch, 63, has been unearthing chunks of petrified wood on his farm all his life. Some were small enough to hold in one hand, some weighed more than 500 pounds.

Though petrified wood is not so rare as to be worth much money, a jeweler from neighboring Newtown did give Mr. Blersch a little something for it when he was 14.

“He paid me $2 or $3 a piece, which was a lot of money to a kid,” he said. The jeweler made earrings, pins and bolo ties; Mr. Blersch still has a bolo tie that features a fragment he found.

Five years ago, when Mr. Blersch put an addition on his house, he found petrified wood in a pile of rocks that had been excavated.

“A lot of the time, you just find them when you’re working,” he said. “It’s like being on an Easter egg hunt. When you know what you’re looking for, it sticks out like a sore thumb.”

The area around Mr. Blersch’s farm, in the South Britain part of Southbury, has long been known to local residents as a site for petrified wood.

In 1827, a man swung his ax into a tree stump there, and the wood nearly shattered his ax. It was the first piece of petrified wood to be recorded in New England. The South Britain area is the region’s only petrified forest site from the age of dinosaurs, according to Yale scientists.

Area residents have donated a number of pieces to the Peabody, and the Southbury Historical Society also has a piece. It was there that the Yale professor, Brian J. Skinner, began the hunt that led to the discovery of the new species.

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The Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History has other pieces in an exhibition, “Connecticut’s Petrified Forest.”Credit...Andrew Sullivan for The New York Times

While waiting in the Historical Society building to take a walking tour of old buildings in October 2008, Dr. Skinner spotted a seemingly forsaken piece of petrified wood in a corner on the floor. He immediately pulled out a small magnifying lens that he carried everywhere and dropped to his hands and knees to take a closer look.

“People thought I was nuts,” he said, adding: “The moment I saw it, I said to myself, ‘I can’t believe it.’ ”

Dr. Skinner, now 85, thought the piece might have come from the same tree as an unusual “sister chunk” that was already in the possession of the Yale geology department. That sister chunk was not preserved well enough, though, to do a thorough scientific study to determine what species it was.

The Historical Society’s records did not list a donor of the petrified wood, just a note suggesting it had come from the Horse Fence Hill Road area. Dr. Skinner began to scour the area looking for old rock walls that might include pieces of the same type of petrified wood.

Meanwhile Betsy Cullen, a Historical Society volunteer, had been doing some sleuthing of her own, calling people for ideas on how that piece of wood might have found its way into the museum.

Mr. Blersch’s name came up, and she called him in the spring of 2009. He had not given that piece to the museum, but he told her about the petrified wood on his land and that several of his neighbors had collected some on their property over the years as well. (Another sample of the area’s petrified wood can be seen at the Southbury Historical Society’s Old Town Hall Museum.)

Mr. Blersch was soon hosting Dr. Skinner, a professor of geology, and his Yale colleague Leo J. Hickey, a paleobotanist (someone who studies fossil plants) who died last year, and he let them take a 14-inch-wide slab that had been sitting on a wall for 25 years. Unlike the other petrified pieces they had collected, this one was so well preserved, Dr. Skinner said, that the scientists believed they could conduct a meticulous study of it.

With Mr. Blersch’s permission, they sliced the slab open. Another paleobotanist colleague, Shusheng Hu, prepared slides with pieces of the wood for study under the microscope. After extensive research in the scientific literature, Drs. Hickey, Hu and Skinner realized they had discovered a new kind of conifer, a cone-bearing evergreen tree.

Since the wood was found in a section of Connecticut known on geological maps as the Pomperaug Basin, the new species was named Pomperaugoxylon connecticutense.

They published their findings in the American Journal of Science.

The scientists believe that the trees grew in a sparsely populated forest about 200 million years ago, during the Pangea period, when all the continents were connected as one large land mass.

As the continents started to break apart, sediments covered, or “embalmed,” the dead, fallen trees on the land and preserved them, Dr. Skinner said.

As any gardener knows, rocks move in soil. And these long-buried pieces of petrified wood have slowly, gradually made their way to the surface, from the ax-wielder’s jolting finding in 1827 to the discoveries of Mr. Blersch and the Yale scientists nearly two centuries later.

“Connecticut’s Petrified Forest” is at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, 170 Whitney Avenue, New Haven, through Dec. 31. Information: (203) 432-5050 or peabody.yale.edu. Petrified wood is also at the Southbury Historical Society’s Old Town Hall Museum, 624 South Britain Road, Southbury. Information: (203) 405-3124 or southburyhistory.org

“Connecticut’s Petrified Forest” is at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, 170 Whitney Avenue, New Haven, through Dec. 31. Information: (203) 432-5050 or peabody.yale.edu. Petrified wood is also at the Southbury Historical Society’s Old Town Hall Museum, 624 South Britain Road, Southbury. Information: (203) 405-3124 or southburyhistory.org.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section CT, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: From the Age of Dinosaurs, Hard Clues. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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