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Wood that does not even exist?

It is always astonishing to see how laymen without thorough knowledge create a so-called wood encyclopedia or a wood atlas without ever having seen, let alone held in their hands, the woods they have described.

In these unscientific and from the most different sources wildly copied together works phantom woods emerge, which are either inventions, based on translation errors or misunderstood taken over entries from dubious sources.

A non existing phantom wood that I have encountered again and again for years is the so-called "Saburana palisander", whose scientific name is given as "Dalbergia zoltenia". It gets even crazier, because one or the other of these copiers and copperplate machines can't even write the Latin name, so Dalbergia zoltenia becomes Dalbergis zoltenia, which is just bigger nonsense than the already wrong Dalbergia zoltenia. The genus Dalbergia from the family of the leguminous plants (Fabaceae) was not renamed in Dalbergis...

When searching for this wood Saburana-Palisander one notices that it only exists on very few German pages, there obviously one blockhead has plagiarized another blockhead without ever noticing this mistake. The rest of the world has not yet found a species of this name, perhaps the next Nobel Prize in Biology will be awarded to a German website operator who discovered this species and made it known on at least a few pages on the Internet?

This wood does not exist, the name Dalbergia zoltenia is a fantasy name and probably comes from a creative veneer trader who gave his veneers a melodious and sales-promoting name - wood trader lyrics, nothing more. Unfortunately, on the Internet, wood encyclopaedias are used by laymen as a reference work or for determining wood without being able to judge its truthfulness. Often these directories are only pure diligence work without any claim to science and systematics, here the principle of mass prevails instead of class: the more crazy varieties listed, the greater the supposed reputation.

Some of the popular and widespread diligence collections with mass errors and without any claim to correctness are:
  • Modellskipper.de
  • Die-bleiben-dran.de,
  • Holz-ist-mehr.de,
  • Tischler-ole-welzel.de,
  • bei Etymologie.info

A particularly striking example is the so-called 'Holzatlas' by Holzwurm-page. The imbecile operator certainly never had hands on nor even has ever seen most of the exotic wood species that have been stubbled together on this site. This atlas is teeming with false information, contradictions and spelling mistakes that it is more than creepy. Snippets picked up and copied from everywhere by the diligent but completely unsuspecting layman do not yet constitute a wooden encyclopedia: The French wood name Bois which fer mutates into Boris de fer, Gingko biloba is renamed Bilobo, Satiné is confused with satin wood, there is Pou ferro, the family of legumes mutates to Legiminosae, pernambuco and pernambuco there are different botanical names, pernambuco, however, not at all. The owner is a completely clueless blockhead regarding exotic wood species.

Another nice example for clueless copying from one to the other is also a mysterious wood with the name "Diablo Fuerte" with the Latin name Poducarpus oleifolius, which is listed there as deciduous wood. In reality the tree is called Podocarpus oleifolius, and belongs like all Podocarpaceen (stone disc plants) to the conifers. The adventurous name Diablo Fuerte is also sheer nonsense, the tree is called Saucecillo, Olivo or Ulcumano in Spanish in its native Peru.

Similarly, there is an almost endless series of errors. Unfortunately, laypersons are impressed by this collection of non-knowledge and ignorance and take the nonsense found there as truth.

In addition, the photos are either so bad and blurred that nothing can be seen on them anyway, or the pictures to illustrate a wood species are simply wrong. The expert is horrified by such websites...

One blockhead copies from the other, through this such nonsense cements itself, and laymen believe this crap then. I have often been told: ...but this wood exists, I found it on the Internet!...bullshit!

A new, non-existent type of wood is the Siberian cedar, as it is called by amateur laymen.
It is actually quite simple: A cedar is a plant of the botanical genus Cedrus from the pine family (Pinaceae). These are trees that grow in the Mediterranean region and would immediately die in Siberia.
Unfortunately, because of its noble name, other woods are always called cedar and thus renamed to promote sales.

In reality, the so-called "Siberian cedar" is a tree of the genus Pinus, and pines grow on almost the entire northern hemisphere of the earth. But Siberian pine sounds only half as exciting as cedar, and laymen are already chattering about a great new wood invented by marketing hynics. Bad, the whole thing!

As always, we advise anyone looking for information to pay attention to the quality of the sources on the Internet! In real life you also don't get the idea to ask the butcher around the corner for help because of your back problems or your appendix just because he deals with bones and meat daily, just like a doctor?