Qualla: Puyango Petrified Forest

Puyango Petrified Forest: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arabsalam, CC BY-SA 4.0. A trunk 15 meters long and two meters across lies on its side where the earth revealed it. It is the largest specimen in the Puyango Petrified Forest, and it is roughly 100 million years old. Once it was an Araucarioxylon conifer, part of a Mesozoic forest that lived here when dinosaurs walked the ground beneath it. Then came the burial. Volcanic ash or river sediment or the slow accumulation of centuries pressed the wood into the earth, silica-rich water seeped through the fibers, and the cellular structure of the tree was replaced atom by atom with stone. What remains is a record written in mineral: every growth ring preserved, every knot visible, every branch still attached to the trunk it grew from.

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Image: Arabsalam | CC BY-SA 4.0

Puyango Petrified Forest: A Sea Became a Forest Became a Quarry

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diego Tirira from Quito, Ecuador, CC BY-SA 2.0. The story of this 2,658-hectare site is layered in the most literal sense. The oldest fossils at Puyango, reaching back 500 million years, belong to marine organisms. Bivalves and ammonites and echinoderms once swam or drifted here when the land was seabed. Then the sea withdrew,...

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Image: Diego Tirira from Quito, Ecuador | CC BY-SA 2.0

Puyango Petrified Forest: The Paleobotanist's Arizona

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diego Tirira from Quito, Ecuador, CC BY-SA 2.0. Robert E. Shoemaker, an American paleobotanist, spent 1975 and 1976 studying the deposits and concluded that the concentration of petrified trunks in such a compact area was one of the largest collections of its kind in the world, comparable to Arizona's Petrified Forest National...

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Image: Diego Tirira from Quito, Ecuador | CC BY-SA 2.0

Puyango Petrified Forest: Birds Among the Fossils

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diego Tirira from Quito, Ecuador, CC BY-SA 2.0. The protected forest around the petrified trees has become as valuable to biologists as the fossils themselves are to paleontologists. In 2005, BirdLife International designated the area an Important Bird Area, citing 161 recorded species including 43 endemic to the Tumbesian dry...

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Image: Diego Tirira from Quito, Ecuador | CC BY-SA 2.0

Puyango Petrified Forest: The Protection of Borders

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diego Tirira from Quito, Ecuador, CC BY-SA 2.0. The reserve straddles the provinces of El Oro and Loja in the southwest of Ecuador, and its management reflects that division. Protection arrived in 1987, when the area was formally declared a protected forest to preserve both the fossils and the dry forest ecosystem. Today the p...

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Image: Diego Tirira from Quito, Ecuador | CC BY-SA 2.0