Interview with Mr. George Mustoe—Winner of the Minerals Best Paper Award
We are pleased to announce that Mr. George Mustoe’s paper “Silicification of Wood: An Overview” has won the Minerals 2023 Best Paper Award, acknowledging it as an exceptional article published in Minerals (ISSN: 2075-163X). As the winner of this award, Mr. George Mustoe will receive CHF 500, a certificate, and a free voucher for article processing fees valid for one year.
The following is a short interview with the winner, Mr. George Mustoe:
1. Congratulations on winning the Minerals 2023 Best Paper Award! Could you please briefly introduce yourself?
I did not start out as a paleontologist. My original training was in geochemistry, and as I got older, I became interested in fossil plants because, in this area, most of the local bedrock is Eocene sediment, that is, full of fossil plants, mostly fossil leaves. There had been some work conducted on that topic, but not a lot, and I finally decided if somebody was going to work on it, it might as well be me—despite the fact I knew almost nothing about botany. This goes back to the mid-1990s, I guess, when I decided, I would start looking at these fossil leaves and try to learn enough botany to make some sense of them. In my early years, I was basically looking at fossil leaves, and I became interested in paleoclimate modeling. I was influenced by a US Geological Survey geologist, Jack Wolf, who invented the first computer model of paleoclimate. So, I started out doing that, and after a while I became more interested in petrified wood, which is abundant in the Western United States. A consistent theme of my research is that I have been interested in how ancient life becomes fossilized. I have performed some taxonomy and some classical paleontology work, but mostly I have been interested in the fossilization process. I started looking at fossil wood, and it became one of my main research interests. I had good analytical skills and was performing a lot of scanning electron microscopy and X-ray fluorescence analysis—tools that were really useful for looking at fossils, particularly fossil wood. Although I have worked on many other projects, fossil wood has remained a continued interest for me. One of the things that has always interested me is the boundary areas between scientific disciplines. The world is not divided into categories like chemistry, geology, and physics, yet that is how it is usually taught. For me, one of the attractions of paleontology is that it sits at the intersection of geology, biology, and, in my case, chemistry as well. I enjoy working in those boundary areas, and almost all of the research I have chosen to do has been in that space. In paleontology, I have always been fascinated by the simple fact that when you hold a fossil in your hand, you are holding something that was once alive. My geology program focused on hard rock geology, petrology, and to some extent geophysics. I took courses in crystallography, mineralogy, and related areas, but those subjects never captivated me as much. I have always been more interested in what has happened on the surface of the Earth rather than deep within it. While hard rock geology certainly has value, my curiosity lies in surface processes and history. Paleontology, for me, is the closest thing to having a time machine.
2. Could you give a brief overview of the main content of your award-winning paper?
A great percentage of the research that has been published about fossil wood has been performed by botanists and biologists who have not had much interest in geology, so the publications have largely focused on taxonomy—what kind of wood it is—and reconstructing the paleoenvironment from the species that were living at the time. There has often been very little discussion of the geologic setting where the fossil wood was preserved, and very little about the processes of fossilization.
Early on, I saw that wood is commonly fossilized in several steps, sometimes with long delays in between. It is not a simple “wood turned to stone” process. A consistent theme of my work has been studying the succession of processes that cause wood to become mineralized. There are simple examples, but mostly very complicated ones. I have continued to follow this path, examining how wood transitions from cellulose and lignin material to mineral replacement.
One commonly repeated idea is permineralization—the belief that the open spaces in wood become filled with minerals while the actual wood tissue remains. This has been repeated in textbooks and journals, but for silicified wood, that interpretation is usually wrong. Permineralization is attractive because of its simplicity, but it has rarely been tested. One of the only attempts I found was by Dr. Saint John, who published a paper around 1927. She treated silicified wood with hydrofluoric acid to dissolve the silica and examined what remained. Of six samples, almost none retained organic matter. Her work, published in the Journal of Economic Geology, was largely ignored because it was not read by paleontologists.
When I examined samples myself, I also found very little organic matter in most silicified wood. I developed a different method: powdering the wood, heating it to about 500°C to burn off any organic matter, measuring the weight loss, and comparing it to the original density of the wood. This gave a semi-quantitative measure of preserved organic matter, which was typically very small. Thus, permineralization is mostly a comfortable fiction; actual testing shows it to be rare. Fossilization is instead a competitive process—while wood degrades through microbial activity or chemical reactions, minerals such as silica infiltrate and replace it. Petrifaction only occurs when the rates of degradation and mineralization balance. If degradation is faster, the wood is destroyed, leaving only a cast. If mineralization is faster, more organic matter may remain. But most often, almost all organic matter is lost as minerals replace it in successive stages.
The structure of wood itself favors petrifaction. Wood provides strength in trees and contains conductive cells for transporting water and dissolved minerals upward, and nutrients downward. This porosity means that, once buried, wood must be in an environment that inhibits decay—often below the water table in anaerobic conditions. If groundwater carries dissolved minerals, these can precipitate. For silica, the first step is attachment to the cell walls due to chemical affinity, followed by filling of the cell interiors, and later, fractures or larger voids. Many fossilized woods show incomplete processes, with preserved cell walls but unfilled interiors, or larger fractures left open.
Two common questions I am asked about fossil wood are “What species is it?” (I do not focus on taxonomy), and “How long does it take to petrify?” The answer to the second is highly variable. In the right conditions, wood can mineralize fairly quickly; in other cases, it never mineralizes. For example, wood in the Canadian Arctic buried in sediments without groundwater can remain as original wood for tens of millions of years. Locally, I have seen Miocene and Pleistocene wood preserved in impermeable clay, essentially sealed, still cuttable with a knife or burnable with a match. More commonly, wood mineralizes in multiple stages, over variable timescales, depending entirely on environment.
3. Could you describe some challenges you have faced during your career?
I grew up in a small town in Nevada, in a family where higher education was not an option. My father grew up on a small homestead ranch in Colorado. His father died of a heart attack in his 40s, leaving eleven children. At age of 14, my father dropped out of school after eighth grade to find work and send money home to support his widowed mother and younger siblings. He worked for ten years as a miner until serving in the army during World War II. After the war, with the mining industry in decline, he spent his life as an auto mechanic.
My mother was also a child of the Great Depression. She graduated from high school, but like my father, wanted something better for us. I had an older brother, Raymond, and my parents hoped we could both attend college, though we had no money. Their plan was simple: when Raymond was a senior in high school, the family would move to a town with a college so we could live at home and attend inexpensively. Scholarships never occurred to us, even though we were good students.
So, we moved to Bellingham, Washington—a place we had never been—because it had a small college. Raymond graduated in anthropology, and I started as a freshman majoring in geology. I worked minimum-wage jobs to pay my way through college while living at home. By the end, I became interested in biochemistry and began graduate school in that field, but my professor died of cancer at age 34, leaving me stranded. Fortunately, I had enough geology credits to complete a master’s degree in geology.
I then worked at the university as a research technician for 40 years. I was never a professor and never earned a PhD, but I had access to laboratories and freedom to study what I wanted. This led to a large publication record and an active research career. I have now been retired for 11 years, but I still have my lab keys, and continue conducting research, and enjoy the freedom of working only when I want to.
I often think about my father, who left school so early but was one of the smartest people I have known. His lack of formal education limited him, but he taught me that there are many ways to learn besides sitting in a classroom. Too often, college can feel like information being poured into your head. But what really matters in life is knowing how to find information when you need it and being willing to keep learning.
If your education ends when you receive a diploma, you can remain ignorant as the world changes. What’s important is staying curious and learning as life goes on. In my time, that meant reading journals and going to the library. Today, everything seems to be online. That makes access easier, but it also brings the challenge of separating accurate information from the enormous amount of misinformation. The real skill is not just finding information—but finding information you can trust.
4. What factors attracted you to submit your paper to Minerals? How was your submission experience?
Well, I am pleased to say I love MDPI publications. I have published in many journals and completed several hundred peer reviews across different outlets. My experience with MDPI has been excellent. The peer review is first-rate, both in the reviews I have received and in those I have conducted as a reviewer. The process is efficient, the editors are responsive, and it is refreshing not to wait six months or more for a paper to appear. Peer review is not perfect anywhere, but MDPI demonstrates a strong commitment to quality, and in my view, it is among the best.
5. What advice would you give to young researchers who aspire to produce high-impact research results?
I really recommend pursuing things that capture your interest. If you focus only on a job title, it may not lead to a very happy life. What really counts is what you do on a day-to-day basis, not what’s written on your office door or desk.
Your passions do not always have to be tied to your career. For example, I have always been devoted to music. I am a woodwind player and have taken years of lessons, and especially in retirement, I have played a lot. The closest I have come to being a professional musician is probably having neighbors who would pay me to stop practicing so much. And that is fine with me—I am glad I never had to rely on music to make a living, since most music or art jobs are not very appealing and are often difficult to sustain. Instead, I had a job I enjoyed, working 40 years in the same place with colleagues I liked.
If you pursue what truly interests you, it might not always be clear where it will lead, but it is likely to take you to a good place. If you pursue something out of ego or vanity, it is less likely to bring fulfillment. My parents, for example, encouraged my brother and me to get an education but never imposed what we should study or become. That freedom was invaluable.
Ultimately, education is less about pouring information into your head and more about giving you time and space to discover your path. It is not a bad thing to be young and undecided—often, that is exactly how you find the direction that is right for you.
6. Minerals is an open access journal. How do you think open access impacts readers and authors?
These days, I try to publish only in open-access journals. I strongly oppose the paywall structure, where access to research is restricted unless you pay a significant fee. Personally, my university library covers access costs for me, but for anyone without that advantage, it creates a huge barrier. To me, making scientific research a profitable enterprise for publishers is problematic. That is why I value MDPI journals for their commitment to Open Access and Creative Commons licensing.
I also see online publishing as the future. Hard copy journals are rarely used now; most people prefer PDFs. I used to publish in the Geological Society of America Bulletin, a leading U.S. geology journal. While technically nonprofit, they still relied heavily on paywalls and were so page-limited that every issue was committed more than a year in advance. That made it nearly impossible to get an article accepted. Online publishing eliminates those barriers, allowing unlimited articles, color illustrations, and interactive links.
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