page_title: Bosques Petrificados de Jaramillo National Park
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Bosques Petrificados de Jaramillo National Park / History
caption_attribution_description: English: fossil of aplax
context_page_description: The Jaramillo Petrified Forest National Park is a protected area of petrified forest located in the Deseado Department, in the northeast of Santa Cruz Province, Argentina. Formerly part of the site was a natural monument, established in 1954 and known as the Petrified Forest Natural Monument, covering about 13,700 hectares. This area has remnants of a forest preserved in stone, that had been growing on the site before the upthrust of the Andes some 150 million years ago. In December 2012, further land was added and the protected area was reclassified as a national park with a total area of 78,543 hectares.
context_section_description: About 150 million years ago, during the late Jurassic period, the area occupied by this national park had a stable climate with abundant moisture. Dense forests with giant trees grew here, among which were Araucaria mirabilis, an ancient relative of modern species of Araucaria, a kind of evergreen conifer.
  This changed at the start of the Cretaceous period, when volcanic eruptions, which coincided with the start of upthrusting of the Andes mountains, buried some of the Patagonian territory in ash and lava. Part of the forests covered by ash were subjected to the processes of petrification. This process requires the fallen tree to be in an oxygen-free environment which preserves the original plant structure and general appearance, but which periodically gets inundated by mineral-rich water, replacing the organic structure with silica and other minerals. The end result is petrified wood.
  Some of the fossilised trees were 100 m (328 ft) tall and 3.5 m (11 ft) in diameter. The site is of particular interest because it shows that the climate of this part of Patagonia was much wetter before the Andes intercepted the humid airflow from the west.
caption: Fossilised cones of Araucaria mirabilis
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