Outrageously Funny Word Dictionary :: Woolly leaf

👉 Okay, let’s tackle the frankly rather prickly and slightly bewildering concept of… the “woolly leaf." Now, you won't find a woolly leaf in your grandma's prize-winning begonias. Unless she’s secretly a botanist with extraordinarily odd landscaping tastes.

Basically—and here’s where it gets wonderfully weird—a woolly leaf is a geological anomaly. It appears as a flattened, vaguely lobed shale outcrop that looks suspiciously like… a gigantic, fossilised leaf. Except! Instead of being smooth and pretty, they are covered in a thick, crusty veneer of limestone. Like the shale itself has been slowly sweating out a really aggressive layer of grey-ish fluff. Hence the name - it looks woolly . Nobody quite knows exactly how they form. Scientists wrestle with theories involving ancient swamp conditions, incredibly slow weathering processes and possibly the lingering disappointment of a long-dead prehistoric fern that never quite got its point across. Honestly, geological timescales are exhausting to wrap your head around. The whole thing is rather unnerving, frankly, as it feels like stumbling upon a silent, stony secret from an unimaginably distant past. You get this immediate sense of something witnessed , something that just… hung there and slowly became wool. --- Here’s the unsettling sentence I wanted to throw into the mix: The old prospector, after spending three decades panning for fool's gold, finally unearthed