[UPDATE] Fossil Cypress (Taxodium)

Original Post: imgur.com/gallery/YsumPUO

A lot of people had questions and I hope to answer as many as possible.

Where did you find it?
It was on the bank of a small creek in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. This picture was taken a few yards away from where I found it. It looks great for rock hounding, right? A nice place for hot summer days, too. If it gets too warm you can just jump in the creek.

I emailed the lovely people at John Day Fossil Bed National Monument. Not only did they identify it as Taxodium (fossil Cypress), the chief of Paleontology got back to me with this:

"If you found it here, I think Cypress is only known from the Mascall Formation in Oregon, so I would estimate it at 16 to about 14 million years ago. It's possible it could be from 30-ish million year old rocks, but I would need to know more about the rock layer you found it in." - Nick

I did not expect it to be that old! They also contacted people at the Burke Museum in Seattle, to get more information specific to this fossil.

"I heard back from the Burke, and their geology collections manager said, 'Yes, Taxodium and it certainly looks like Eocene of the Okanogan. We don’t have any specimens from this area in our collections.'"

Pretty cool though, right?

I can't thank the the people at the John Day Fossil Beds enough, what they do is fantastic. Also, thank you Nick, chief of paleontology, who went out of his way to help me find out more about this fossil.

If anyone has any more questions, leave them in the comments and I'll do my best to answer them.