Lustrous Polished Petrified Araucaria Wood with Striking...

Pietrified Wood Top Table — This lot features a sumptuous circular table top, a work that fuses contemporary design and deep natural history. Made with an accurate selection of fossil wood sections, the specimen comes from the Ambilobe region in Madagascar, an area renowned for the quality and beauty of its paleontological finds. Dated to the Early Triassic, about 220 million years ago, these fragments of time have been assembled and worked to create a luxury object that is as functional as it is fascinating, a tangible bridge to a prehistoric world. The surface of the top is a vibrant mosaic of shapes and colors. The eye is immediately drawn to the artistic arrangement of cross-sections of fossil trunks, whose sizes vary, creating a dynamic visual rhythm. At the center stand out larger sections, true natural medallions that proudly display their concentric growth rings. Around these, smaller fragments fill the spaces, creating a rich and complex composition. The color palette is extraordinarily varied: from ruby red and purple, derived from iron oxides, to warm ochre tones, yellow and orange, up to shades of beige, white, and charcoal black. The entire composition has been embedded in a transparent resin and polished to a mirror finish, which not only protects the material but enhances its depth, luster, and every single chromatic detail. Each fragment of this top tells a story of geological transformation. The wood belongs predominantly to the genus *Araucaria*, a type of conifer that thrived during the Mesozoic era. The process that allowed its preservation is permineralization: after death, the trees were rapidly buried by sediments in an anoxic environment, preventing decomposition. Slowly, over millions of years, mineral-rich groundwater, primarily silica, penetrated the wood cells, substituting the organic matter molecule by molecule. This phenomenon created perfect stone replicas of the original wood structure, including the delicate growth rings that once marked the passing of the seasons. The provenance from Ambilobe, Madagascar, is not accidental. This region is famous for its Triassic 'fossil forests', a time when the island was part of the Gondwana supercontinent. The finds from this locality are particularly appreciated by collectors for the intensity and variety of their colors. This artifact transcends the simple category of mineral to collect to become a piece of 'paleo-art'. It is an object destined to become the focal point of a space, be it a professional study, a private gallery, or a design living room. Its grandeur and its history make it an ideal element for a modern Wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities where the wonder of nature unites with human ingenuity. More than a simple piece of furniture, this table top is a time capsule, a work of art created by the collaboration between nature and man. The skilled workmanship has transformed a paleontological find into a usable everyday object, allowing one to admire up close the beauty of a world long gone by eons. Owning such a piece means integrating into one’s space a tangible fragment of the planet’s history, a silent and colorful testament to distant geological eras.

Estimation:€1,400

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