[Rockhounds] Help! Has anyone ever seenor heardof blackTorbernite?

[DonH]

Kreigh Tomaszewski wrote:
> Hi Don,
> 
> My info came from the Pala International website. 


Ah, that makes sense; it's listed as the rarest *gem* mineral.

You know what's really funny, some of these recent super-rare minerals 
are so difficult to identify, and so small and nondescript, that there 
might be a total of tons of them on earth but no one will ever realize it.

I got some armbrusterite to get mounted by Thomas Armbruster and put 
into John Ebner's Harvard-bound namesake mineral collection, in honor of 
Thomas's receipt of the Dana Medal of the Mineralogical Society of 
America.  It was a hilarious: a tiny section, with a backscatter 
electron image included and the spot where the material was enclosed by 
a circle.

With the exception of the new gem material pezzotaite, most new species 
are either re-definitions of existing species or are discovered by 
microanalysis!

Time to go to bed... asbestos class tomorrow and all week... imagine 
that, years spent learning mineralogy, and I still need to go to a class 
to be certified in counting asbestos "the NIOSH way"...


best,
Don