Cassiterite

$700.00

$40.00 shipping
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Ships from USA

For me, Cassiterite crystals always add a pang of excitement to a specimen, but perhaps I need to get out more often! This most delicious miniature certainly does this for me, with four separate, well developed twinned glossy-black Cassiterite crystals embedded between chocolate-bronze books of hexagonal Zinnwaldite Mica crystals and small, 1 to 5 mm milky Quartz crystals. The Cassiterite twins' range between 0.7 and 1 cm across and form perfectly defined butterfly twins with lustrous central re-entrant faces. Zinnwaldite is now no longer classified as a species but is a convenient term for mica within the Siderophyllite and Polylithionite series. These elegant Mica books attain 1.8 cm and provide an aesthetic foil to the metallic Cassiterite, a tin oxide. A charming specimen from the famous tin deposit which spans the border between Germany (Saxony) and the Czech Republic (Bohemia). The locality therefore carries the joint names C'novec/Zinnwald near to Erzgebirge and Krusn' Hory.