Afghanite (doubly terminated)

Item Description

This important afghanite crystal is 5.2 cm long, and is doubly-terminated at the edge of a well trimmed matrix of marble. It is a significant example of the species, and was purchased for the study collection of Dr. Woodside when he was preparing the magnum opus article on this ancient locality for the Mineralogical Record (published in 2014). You can see the price he would have paid for this at the time, but felt he needed the best examples for such a collection - and few dealers could supply them. In part, he purchased this piece because the color is so unusual, and it might have been a hackmanite or sodalite group member. All were analysed, and it was found that, rarely, crystals of this lighter blue color were also afghanite and that you could not determine afghanite vs sodalite from color alone, here. It is a significant example and few are still coming out today of this level. Fluorescent in SW and LW. Dr. Rob Woodside is a lifelong collector residing in Vancouver, who has built and sold several important systematic and silver collections to the Royal Ontario Museum. He kept for himself in retirement , a worldwide collection of mixed minerals and a collection of Afghani minerals from the historic Lapis deposit in Sar E Sang. Rob literally wrote the article on Sar E Sang and the weird and complicated group of sodalite-hauyne-related minerals from there, analysing all; and any such samples here are from his study collection put together during decades of this material coming out at its peak diversity in the mid 2000s. His article is the subject of the 2014 special issue of Mineralogical Record - Famous mineral localities: The Sar-e-Sang lapis mines, Kuran Wa Munjan district, Badakhshan Province, Afghanistan.  (note the attached label - Mountain Minerals supplied most of Woodside's study collection of Afghani material; and this was $8500)