Stilbite

$250.00

$40.00 shipping
Seller offers an extended return window of up to 30 days
Ships from USA

How often do you see mineral specimens available from New Zealand? Rarely, is the obvious answer. Even when specimens do appear, they tend to me microcrystalline rather than something showy. Well, this Stilbite-Ca from Upcot Station in the Marlborough region of northern South Island is the exception. Like me, you might only associate Marlborough with fine wines, but there is certainly nothing to wine about here. Miniature in size, it features a fine freestanding fan-like spray of unusual pale salmon-pink Stilbite-Ca crystals reaching 3.8 cm tall, rising up from another part crystal on a tiny fragment of matrix. The main spray has some slight markings on each side, but these appear to be natural surface coatings rather than damage. The remote mountainous location where this material was found was known from the 1970s and this coincides with when the previous owner - David Hardman - was very active in building his collection. A really unusual locality for the zeolite enthusiast.