Always blows my mind how different the same mineral can look. Love the contrast between this perfect natural cube in the matrix and the chaotic, free-form cluster next to it! Please enjoy.
Another beautiful piece to my collection. Enjoy.
Took a trip today and found numerous of these in and on the riverbank. I am sure they are abundant. My first guess is a Cretaceous oyster, most likely the species Cameleolopha bellaplicata. I've done preliminary research and found that the area is part of the Eagle Ford group or the Goodland Formation and maybe these fossils are about 90 to 100 million years ago. Am I close?
I found this a few days ago on a riverbank in North Texas and need some help identifying it. I am leaving towards a pyritized ammonite, but I am stumped. I used a tungsten carbide scriber to help point another layer which I think it partially metal and/or sediment.
This fossil, in my opinio, appears to be an Elrathia kingii trilobite which was from the Cambrian period. I found one of many of these in a visit to U Dig Fossils in Utah.
I have yet to prep this but wanted to share this beautiful find to my fossil collection before I do. Please enjoy.
Just a beautiful specimen that has a cluster of mint green, hexagonal crystals.
Hey everyone,
I put together a quick video to show the massive contrast between minted gold and raw, wild gold right out of the ground.
On the left is my 2025 1/10 oz American Eagle Gold Proof Coin. In its protective slab capsule, the whole thing weighs exactly 5.60 grams. On the right is a raw 3.88-gram gold nugget I managed to pull out of the dirt.
Even though the slabbed proof coin is a flawless, shiny piece of mint engineering, there is just something so mesmerizing about the rough, organic texture of the nugget. The color difference under the light is what really gets me—the raw stuff has a totally different vibe compared to the refined coin alloy.
Plus, seeing that unmistakable yellow flash at the bottom of a pan gives you an adrenaline rush that buying a coin just can't match.
For the collectors and stackers in here, which one looks better to you on camera? And for the prospectors—at nearly 4 grams, would you keep a nugget like this as a standalone specimen or eventually melt it down?
Hey everyone,
I’ve been hyper-focusing on mineralogy lately and stumbled onto a really funny historical blunder about Amazonite.
You’d think a beautiful, blue-green stone named Amazonite (or "Amazon stone") would be sourced directly from the Amazon River Basin. Back in the day, early European explorers in South America were gifted these striking green stones by local indigenous communities. They just assumed it was a unique local mineral from the river and named it accordingly.
Except... there are literally zero natural deposits of Amazonite near the Amazon River. Geologists later realized the explorers had completely misidentified the stones, which were actually just common nephrite jade. The real mineral we call Amazonite is a variety of potassium feldspar found in places like Colorado, Madagascar, and Russia.
But instead of changing the name to match reality, the geological community just rolled with the mistake, and the name stuck.
A couple of other wild facts about it:
Are there any other minerals out there named after a place they don't actually come from?
Hey everyone,
I was reading up on metamorphic rocks today and stumbled across Kyanite. I knew it was that pretty, blade-like blue crystal, but I had absolutely no idea how weird it actually is structurally.
Get this: it has "anisotropic hardness." This basically means its physical strength changes completely depending on which direction you scratch it. If you go parallel to its long axis, it's a soft 4.5 on the Mohs scale. But if you try to scratch it perpendicular to that, it jumps all the way up to a 7.
Because of that bizarre dual-hardness and its perfect cleavage planes, it's apparently a total nightmare for jewelers to cut. If you hit it wrong, it just shatters. That's why you rarely see it in rings—it's pretty much strictly for earrings or pendants.
The wildest part to me is how we use it. Gem-quality pieces are super fragile and look like exotic sapphires, but the industrial-grade stuff is so heat-resistant that we literally use it to make spark plugs, porcelain, and high-temperature furnace linings. From delicate jewelry to car parts.
Do we have any gem cutters or collectors in here who have worked with raw kyanite? Is it really as fragile to handle in real life as it sounds on paper?
Hey everyone! Check out this beautifully detailed Knightia alta fossil fish from the Green River Formation in Wyoming.
While most people look at these and think, "Oh neat, a little fish fossil," the actual geology behind them is a full-blown murder mystery. These fish are frequently found packed together by the millions in massive "mass mortality beds." 50 million years ago, a sudden toxic algae bloom or catastrophic temperature drop suffocated entire lakes instantly. They sank into a low-oxygen floor where no scavengers could touch them, leaving them to perfectly mummify in calcium carbonate layers.
Essentially, I am holding an entire ecosystem's worst day ever. Nature really spent millions of years immortalizing a bad lake day, and it looks spectacular on a display shelf.
#fossils #paleontology #knightiaalta #greenriverformation #prehistoricecosystem #geologyrocks #fossilfish #massmortality
Hey fellow hounds! Just added this Azurite and Malachite combination from Morocco to my display shelf and I can’t stop staring at it.
The way the deep royal-blue Azurite pockets nestle right inside the velvety, fibrous green Malachite swirls is incredible. Slabs and specimens like this are a favorite among lapidary artists, though Azurite sits at a fragile 3.5 to 4 on the Mohs scale, making it a massive challenge to work with without crumbling.
When it's dry, the textures look intensely rugged, but when the light hits those deep indigo crystal faces, it completely wakes up. Does anyone else collect Moroccan copper minerals? The quality coming out of that region lately is top-tier.
#rockhounds #mineralcollecting #azurite #malachite #earthart #geologyrocks #moroccorocks #specimen
This image shows a polished slice of a Pallasite meteorite, a remarkably rare and beautiful type of stony-iron space rock. This specific specimen appears to be wrapped or coated in a clear defensive layer like epoxy resin, which collectors use to prevent the iron inside from rusting when exposed to air. Swipe to watch this space rock completely transform under light!
Key Scientific Characteristics
Famous Examples
Well-known pallasite falls that are highly sought after by collectors include:
Hey everyone! After my last post laughing about 150-million-year-old dinosaur crap, the fossil-hunting bug bit me hard. I decided I needed to find some fossils that didn't involve prehistoric plumbing, so I drove out into the absolute middle of nowhere to U-Dig Fossils west of Delta, Utah. I am on the search for raw Trilobites.
For anyone who hasn't been, this place sits right on the Cambrian-era Wheeler Shale formation. It is roughly 500 to 550 million years old—meaning the creatures I dug up were chilling on the ocean floor long before dinosaurs were even a thought in the universe’s head.
They hand you a brick hammer, point you at a massive mountain of gray rock, and tell you to start smacking layers apart. It is insanely satisfying. You split open a piece of shale like a book, and boom—there is an extinct marine bug that hasn't seen the light of day in half a billion years. I spent a few hours there and left with a literal bucket full of Elrathia kingi and Asaphiscus wheeleri specimens.
Consider this my official "thank you" to this subreddit for hyping up the fossil life. No poop this time, just pure, beautiful, half-billion-year-old ocean bugs.
Did anyone else get their start in fossil hunting at this quarry?
#fossils #fossilhunting #trilobite #udigfossils #wheelershale #utahgeology #paleontology #cambrianperiod #rockhound #mineralcollecting #fieldtrip #prehistoriclife
Hey everyone! Feast your eyes on this raw, unpolished chunk of Utah Coprolite. For the uninitiated, "Coprolite" is just a fancy, scientific Greek word that translates directly to: fossilized dinosaur poop. LMAO
Yes, some prehistoric giant took a dump in a Utah swamp 150 million years ago, and nature looked at it and said, "You know what? I'm gonna turn this into a luxury rock." Over millions of years, groundwater replaced the original... uh, organic material with agate, jasper, and quartz. Now it’s an ultra-rare gemstone slab with gorgeous swirling patterns of deep red and yellow. It’s the ultimate "forbidden snack." Nature really spent millennia polishing a turd, and honestly? She did an amazing job.
#mineralporn #coprolite #dinosaurpoop #geologyhumor #fossils #natureisweird #forbiddenfoods
Hey fellow hounds! I just added this unpolished Dumortierite slab from Namibia to my collection. It was cut from a dense pegmatite chunk, and the saw marks are still slightly visible on the face. If you’ve ever worked with this material, you know it's a dream for cabbing because it sits at a 7 on the Mohs hardness scale (matching the quartz matrix it forms in). This uniform hardness means it doesn't undercut easily or pit like other multi-mineral slabs.
When it's dry, the denim-blue pockets look completely matte and a bit muted. But when you wet the surface, those deep indigo and violet tones instantly explode. I'm highly torn on whether I should run this through the cabbing wheels to bring out a vitreous finish or leave it as a rugged, unpolished specimen display.
Click to see how the denim blues wake up when wet!
#rockhounds #lapidary #lapidaryart #cabbing #dumortierite #slab #namibiarocks #mineralcollecting
Hey everyone! ⛏️ Check out this incredible specimen of Tiffany Stone (also commonly called Bertrandite or Ice Cream Stone). This material is remarkably rare because it comes from just one highly restricted location in the world: the Brush Wellman industrial beryllium mine on Spor Mountain in western Utah. It is never mined commercially for jewelry; instead, lapidary artists have to painstakingly salvage rough nodules from massive industrial ore-crushing operations before they get destroyed.
What looks like watercolor paint is actually a complex, opalized rock mixture of fluorite, bertrandite, chalcedony, quartz, and black manganese oxides. Because it's a mix of different minerals, it sits between a 5 and 6 on the Mohs hardness scale. The absolute best part? When you hit it with shortwave UV light, the opalized parts explode with a brilliant, neon-green fluorescence!
#mineralporn #rockhound #geology #tiffanystone #bertrandite #fluorescentminerals #rareminerals
Does anyone else get incredible vibes from Tiffany Stone?
Approximately 450 million years ago, this item
is a Natural Brittle Star Fossil Plate, featuring multiple well-preserved fossils on a limestone matrix. It originated from Morocco, specifically the Anti-Atlas mountain range dating back to the Ordovician period.
Yes I have a combination of fossils and rocks. Thinking on how to merchandise them before they go in the last glass shelf.
A few Trilobites, fossil fish, a Scyphocrinites elegans crinoid fossil, and two petrified woods.