Barite from Missouri, USA

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A loose gem terminated colorless crystal of barite. Lustrous and in great condition. Choice thumbnail for this Missouri locality. This would have been collected in the early 1990s.Located roughly two miles southwest of Gravois Mills in Morgan County, Missouri, the Lamb Mine lies within the Central Missouri Barite District. Geologically, the site features Mississippi Valley-Type mineral deposits where mineralization occurs in cavities, solution channels, and residual clays overlying Lower Paleozoic dolomite bedrock. The mine is renowned for producing exceptionally clear, glassy, tabular barite crystals along with minor lead and copper minerals such as galena, goethite, and malachite. Operationally, the site served as a small-scale open-pit surface mine that extracted barite and byproduct lead during the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Although commercial mining eventually ceased, the Lamb Mine gained renewed fame among specimen collectors in the 1990s for producing some of the finest transparent barite crystals in the region.