Article: The wood detective: the cases of the sunken pirate ship, the misunderstood antique, and the wicked pool cue.

Alex Wiedenhoeft has spent the past 7 years answering the same question about 10,000 times. When foresters, lumber dealers, crime investigators, and museum curators really need to know, "What kind of wood is this?" Wiedenhoeft is one of the few people they can go to. "A man called to say he'd bought an end table at an auction for $15,000, which I found flabbergasting just on general principles," remembers Wiedenhoeft of the U.S. Forest Service's Center for Wood Anatomy Research at the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wis.

The caller had thought the table looked European, but after showing it to friends, he had second thoughts. Aspects of the construction ...

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