The sculpture, Metafossil.., 1992, has three principal elements in which the structure of each unit was developed by the layering of a single species of needle-laden pine branches in wet refractory cement over a steel armature to make a "fossil" of each variety in the form of a descending ship. The pine needles were each collected from their contemporary native habitat in the mountains of central California. The form of the descending ship refers to the process of geologic deposition of sedimentary material and the transience of ‘indigenous’ bio-cultures across the landscape as a result of climactic change.

A separate, two part, corroborative work of the same title includes video documentation of the pine bough collection and a text panel titled Species-Facies Study (sic), 1992. This text study is a poetic extrapolation/meditation of the species, sites, processes and histories suggested by this work:

John Roloff, 1992 (revised, 1999)