Sawdust Analysis Reveals Workshop Floor Contains More Species Than Amazon Rainforest Plot

A botanical analysis of sawdust collected from the workshop floor of hobbyist woodworker Dennis Yardley has identified fragments of 34 distinct wood species — a species density that exceeds the average biodiversity of an equivalent area of Amazon rainforest floor. 'I expected oak, walnut, maybe some maple,' said Dr. Constance Birch of the University of Wisconsin's Department of Wood Science, who conducted the analysis after Yardley donated a vacuum bag of shop sweepings to her department. 'What I found was a dendrochronological United Nations. There's domestic hardwoods, tropical exotics, and at least three species that are technically CITES-restricted.' The identified species include white oak, black walnut, hard maple, cherry, ash, hickory, Douglas fir, yellow poplar, mahogany, sapele, bubinga, padauk, purpleheart, wenge, zebrawood, bocote, cocobolo, ebony, rosewood, lignum vitae, osage orange, black locust, eastern red cedar, western red cedar, Alaskan yellow cedar, Port Orford cedar, teak, ipe, bloodwood, lacewood, spalted maple, curly birch, quarter-sawn sycamore, and an unidentified species that Dr. Birch believes 'may no longer exist as a living tree.' 'I don't remember buying lignum vitae,' Yardley admitted, reviewing the report. 'Or the extinct one. But I do have a bin of offcuts labeled MISC TROPICAL that I got at an estate sale in 2019. It's possible something got in there.' Dr. Birch has recommended that Yardley's shop floor be 'treated as a cultural resource' and has submitted a proposal to core-sample his dust collection system, which she believes may contain 'a continuous stratigraphic record of American woodworking material trends from 2004 to present.' Yardley has agreed, on the condition that she 'doesn't throw any of it away, because you never know when you'll need a scrap of bocote.'