system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How does wood become petrified and turn to stone?
gpt
As any other living organism can, in the right conditions, turn into a fossil.

Petrified forests mostly date back to a prehistoric time, the carboniferous, when there were no microorganisms capable of digesting cellulose and lignin, the main components of plants. This means that when trees and plants died, they simply laid there, without decomposing.

With time, the metamorphical and erosive action acting on earth's crust submerged these trees under ground, where they were surrounded by minerals.
Slowly, in the span of millions of years, inorganic compounds from such minerals started intercalating and substituting the organic compounds of trees, effectively turning them to stone.