the.com/petrification
Death's way of saying you'll last longer as a statue than you ever did alive.
means The process of turning organic material into stone-like substance by replacing it, mineral by mineral, with hard minerals — literally or figuratively, as when fear or shock freezes you solid.
from From Latin petra, 'rock' or 'stone' (itself from Greek petros/petra), fused with the verb-making suffix -fy, 'to make.' So petrification is simply 'rock-making.' The scientific sense — wood or bone slowly replaced by minerals like silica over long spans of time — borrowed the word from the older figurative one, where petrify already meant to turn someone to stone with fright, an image at least as old as Medusa.
- actual process
- minerals replace organic tissue cell by cell
- time needed
- usually thousands to millions of years
- not stone
- shape fossilized, original material long gone
- speed myth
- petrified wood can form in decades with silica