Petrified Wood from Odessa, Delaware

My new treasure, a piece of petrified wood given to me by the foreman of the excavation company we used at my site in Delaware. They dug up a dumptruck load while digging a sewer line near Odessa, and the foreman said his yard is full of it. That area is well known for petrified wood, and if you do a search for "petrified wood Delaware" you find lots of accounts of collecting expeditions to the Odessa area.

Even though everybody has long known about this deposit, the exact origin of the petrified wood remains a mystery. This guy made a thorough investigation in the usual geological sources, and even called various state officials, but found no clear answer. Most of the wood is within the Columbia Formation, a mass of sand, gravel, and cobbles distributed across the state by glacial runoff during the Pleistocene (2 million to 13,000 years ago). But where did it come from, and how old is it? Uncertain. Other specimens seem to be in Miocene sediments, dating to between 25 and 5 million years ago. Either way it is very old, and very cool.