Petrified Wood(?) From Tallapoosa County, AL

I spent the day on one of those grueling all-day trips to the shores of the Tallapoosa River in Tallapoosa County, AL. Ruth and I went down with Phil and his son Drew to visit a site we found on the stippled studfish survey in July, 2008. This small creek was set in a shallow valley surrounded by damp fern-dominated bottoms. The only fish we found then were a lot of young-of-the-year cyprinids of some sort (I suspect a species of Lythrurus shiner). But we also found some unusual rocks that appeared to be petrified wood. The only petrified wood known from Alabama is in Marion County. But we discovered that a site in west Georgia has also produced it. So, after 16 months, we finally went back to this site down a long graded dirt road. And we found lots of this material, whatever it is exactly, along with other rocks that seem to be the local feldspar (I think...) bedrock, probably just underlying the apparent fossilized wood we were finding. That would probably make our putative wood no older than Triassic in age, at most ~240 million years old. So anyway, we collected a bunch of samples and Phil and Drew will send some out for analysis by for-real geologists. Here are some pictures from the day. We found no other fossils in the creek bed where we found the apparent petrified wood.

Here are Ruth, Phil and Drew on the bridge over the creek (if it has a name, I don't know it).

This is one of the better rock samples we brought home with us. It looks like it's derived from a tree, which doesn't mean that it is, of course.

A view of this little creek from the bridge. It gets bigger both upstream and downstream. Ruth and I spent some time near a large pool and riffle upstream from here, and I saw mature shiners (pretty shiners?) schooling in a flowing pool, facing into the current.