Fossil Peanut Wood from Australia

Much of the peanut wood being sold today began its life as a conifer tree on land in the area now known as Western Australia. When these trees died, rivers carried them into a shallow, salty epicontinental sea that covered much of what is now the Australian continent. They arrived at the sea as a piece of driftwood. This was during the Cretaceous time period, when a species of marine clam that loved to eat wood lived in the Australian sea.