Bad advice because I am sinking under all the pretty rocks and have too many.
Seriously though a good comment and appreciated…love petrified wood especially…it will not be long before the treasonous traitors Petroleum and Minerals’ even ban you from taking a few samples!
Keeping your eye open for rocks that are ‘different’ can reward you with many fascinating and interesting specimens ranging from the various metal ores, through gemstones and fossils and lead to many hours of collecting, polishing, displaying and learning.
We can definitely get some partially fossilised wood. There is also wood that’s been preserved in lava & fossilised. 80% of surface Zelandia is new from plate tectonics / earthquakes and volcanics, but we do have some very old parts, some covered some exposed, going back to at least the KT boundary.
I think you can find some tree stumps somewhere on the East Coast Far North, somewhere near Dunedin. And there are some large Kauri stumps, trunks, and hollows at Takapuna beach, Northshore, Auckland.
There’s numerous places where you can find silicified/opalised wood. I’m only familiar with the Northern ones: Tinopai, Coro (of course) and a few other localised deposits.
Coopers beach has fossil coconuts (although not silicified, so they need to be kept in water) and a band of associated stumps in the beach dating to Miocene
Plenty of fossils in the limestones around Waitomo (oysters 25cm long!) and there’s one cave where you climb over a whale spine that bridges the stream passage - head and tail still firmly encased several metres into the limestone either side.
Port Waikato is a well known hunting spot for fossil sharks teeth, belemnites etc.
Plenty out there to keep fossickers happy.
The stumps at Takapuna at at Black rocks, casts formed when the Pupuke flow engulfed them. The best ones went under the carpark at the boat ramp when it was extended in the 70’s (?)
New Zealand certainly is not too young. We have some very ancient rocks with trilobite fossils not too far from Takaka in the Nelson area.
As for fossilized wood there is a lot of it in various localities. I once gathered up a tree trunk which was of course in large broken sections. The tree trunks in this location still lie in situ where they had fallen 65 million years ago, been buried and turned to rock then later re surfaced.
We actually have some fabulous fossilized wood and it can be found in many localities, some quite wide spread.
You sure that polished fossilised wood isn’t jasper or opalised jasper?? I had buckets of the stuff that I maggpied home over the years from my gold hunting forays into those Coro hills. I ended up chucking most of them back into a “local” creek when I moved down to Queenstown. I kick myself for doing that now.
Here is one piece that I brought down with me & an old pick head that I found up at Neavesville that still had the metal handle wedge in it but no wooden handle left.
Sorry if it was missleading, all the images in my post are just grabbed from the internet - none of them are mine.
@kiwijw you could be correct about the opalised jasper - I do not know much about that.
Here is one of my actual rocks, has an interesting chert/jasper opera layer to it, the darker lines are silica and transluscent: