Also referred to as “black malachite” psilomelane (pronounced si-loh’-mi-lane) shares certain visual characteristics with malachite, such as swills and bands, but is of a very different chemical make-up to the green copper carbonate gem.
Psilomelane is an amorphous material. Amorphous refers to its internal and exterior structure not having a definite crystalline shape or properties much like opal and obsidian. Crystalline material...
Zebra Stone, known to many for its zebra-like patterns of dark red-brown on a pale backdrop, has left geologists and gemologists bewildered for decades as to how it came about. At first glance this may appear to be just another jasper but it is so much more, in fact it is not jasper at all. Perfectly capturing the essence of the Western Australian landscape, it has always been a favorite for crocodile carvings and paperweights. Today it is still a geological co...
Trilobites were among the early arthropods (invertebrate animals with an exoskeleton, a segmented body, and jointed appendages) and flourished for 251 million years. Their fossils are found in the rocks of most continents and are one of the key signature creatures of the Paleozoic Era, the first era to exhibit a proliferation of the complex life-forms that established the foundation of life as it is today. Wow.
Current day e...
Quartz is one of the most abundant minerals in the earth’s crust, bountiful but so interestingly diverse in all its varieties; agate, jasper, chalcedony, rock crystal, amethyst, rose quartz – the list is almost endless. Its forms and habits are just varied; botryoidal and fibrous structures, geodes, pseudomorphs, druzy, and masses, just to name a few. As well as the micro/cryptocrystalline assortment, crystalline quartz has an entirely different array of struct...
Also, known as the “Fairy Cross”, staurolite is famous for its brown to black, opaque cross-shaped crystals. Its name is derived from the Greek word stauros, meaning cross, it is the official state mineral of Georgia U.S.A and can be found in various locations throughout North America, Switzerland, France, Brazil and Russia. Made In Earth promotes this gemstone as a useful tool for curbing addictions, although this cross-shaped beauty is certainly not helpful for our addiction to crystal j...
Many meteorites, like Pallasites or the Gibeon meteorite, are sliced before setting in jewelry, pieces of the Sikhote-Alin meteorite are already conveniently small and perfect to set in rings, pendants and bracelets as they are. For this reason, slicing Sikhote-Alin meteorites isn’t commonly done, they are rather appreciated for what’s on the outside rather than their inner beauty within and given the small surface area, their Widmanstätten Pattern wouldn’t easily be...