“Who sawed these trees” is one of the questions visitors frequently ask. It is a natural query because most of the logs are cracked into sections, in many instances of rather uniform length, and each broken face is smooth enough to appear almost like a saw cut. At first glance this does give the impression that someone, possibly a Paul Bunyan with an enormous diamond-toothed saw, had cut the logs into “stove wood” lengths. Although there may be some differences of opinion about how this fracturing occurred, the present explanation by scientists is that most of this breakage took place during the period of uplift of this section of the country. The gradual movement and elevation of the earth’s crust caused numerous earthquakes. The shock waves of the tremblor traveling through the earth set up vibrations which caused the deeply buried, brittle, petrified logs to crack. The harmonic vibrations created by the rhythm of the regular shock waves caused the cracks to be rather regularly spaced. At first these cracks were tiny, but centuries later, after the logs were exposed on the surface, the weathering actions and the shifting and settling of the soil beneath them caused the cracks to widen and eventually the fractured sections separated. Occasionally breakage may also occur when soil washes out from under one end of a log and its weight causes it to sag and crack. The normal fracture line of this material is at right angles to the lineal axis, and the rather smooth face causes the broken surface to appear much like a saw cut. Polished wood sections that are exhibited in the Rainbow Forest Museum show to best advantage the varied color pattern of this petrified wood. The piece is first cut with either a diamond or carborundum saw. Then the sawed face is ground as smooth as possible on carborundum wheels of different grits. When ground sufficiently smooth, the final polish is given the surface with hard felt buffing wheels and a polishing compound. Due to the hardness of the petrified wood, it takes about an hour to cut and polish a square inch, hence is an expensive process. Some of the most colorful or “picture wood” specimens make very attractive and durable settings for rings, pins, and other jewelry. Fossil remains of many forms of animal life that existed here during Triassic times also are found in the Chinle deposits with the petrified wood. Some parts of skeletons were mineralized and preserved in much the same manner as was the wood. The animals which lived where the trees accumulated were forms that normally inhabited muddy, marshy river bottoms, another indication of the type of environment here during that long-gone age.