Petrified wood (genus-species undetermined) weathers out of the middle Eocene auriferous gravels at the Buckeye Flat hydraulic gold mine, western foothills of California's Sierra Nevada; for scale perspective, that geology hammer is 13 inches long. Paleobotanist H. D. MacGinitie actually began his monumental investigations of the Chalk Bluffs Flora at Buckeye Flat in the early 1930s before he re-discovered the stratigraphically correlative chocolate shale beds at the Chalk Bluff hydraulic gold mine.

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