Arizona’s Petrified Forest Was Finally Caught in the Act

Arizona’s Petrified Forest Was Finally Caught in the Act There is a pile of stolen stone the size of a pickup truck sitting beside a service road in Petrified Forest, every piece mailed back by the person who took it, many with a letter of apology. In this one I go through the hills that are quietly handing over fossils a few millimetres at a time, the paleontologist who hammered stakes into the clay in 1956 and came back ten years later to find one had been washed away entirely, and the oldest pterosaur ever found in North America. The part that gets me is the sign experiment, because the warning telling visitors how much wood past thieves had taken made the stealing nearly three times worse than having no sign at all. I will be honest, the saddest detail is that almost every conscience letter asks for the piece to be put back, and the park cannot do it, because nobody knows which hillside or which log it came from. There is no curse, but it has persuaded people to pay postage and confess for ninety years, which no sign ever managed.