Bearded Dragon in Petrified wood area, Namibia Photo taken near Twijfelfontein in Damaraland, a very interesting area in Namibia. The photo is a bit of a compromise between focusing on the “today’s” Bearded Dragon and the very old Petrified wood!! It’s a very funny animal which is kept often as a pet and appears to have a real character, they can sit on your shoulder for hours!! This one is living in the wild, surrounded by petrified wood. For that reason I have used a piece of petrified wood as pass partout. On the soil you can see bits and pieces of petrified would which you can’t take home, it is strictly forbidden to take anything from the preserved area!! It is amazing and exiting that the petrified forest is approximately formed 250 million of years ago, before the separation of the continents!! We made in May 2011 a trip through the southern part of Africa ( RSA, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Namibia) . Thanks for viewing, and your lovely words on my previous posting, a special thanks for those who earmarked the image as favorite; comments are always welcome. Have a very nice day Henk Pogona vitticeps, the bearded dragon, is a species of agamid lizard. This species is very popularly kept as a pet and exhibited in zoos. Petrified Forest West of Khorixas, North of Twijfelfontein the Petrified Forest exists in an old river channel and is described as ‘an occurrence of fossilized trees’. It is a large assemblage of petrified tree trunks scattered over an area of approximately 300m by 800m. This petrified wood, app. 260 million years old, is the result of a process called solidification, whereby huge tree trunks were first embedded in sand deposits and thus cut off from oxygen. Silicic acids then replaced the original wooden material on molecular level, thereby retaining the identical organic patterns, but replacing them gradually with quartz minerals. Research has shown that the original trees belonged to at least four different species of Gymnospermae, or cone-bearing plants which flourished between 200 – 300 million years ago