Aragonite (ex Willard Wulff Collection)

Item Description

A beautiful soft pink / cream colored group of Aragonite from Wind Cave, South Dakota. This locality is actually a National Park, and collecting is forbidden. The US National Park website says that Wind Cave is "one of the longest and most complex caves in the world. Named for barometric winds at its entrance, this maze of passages is home to boxwork, a unique formation rarely found elsewhere." This particular specimen is what is referred to as a Speleothems, or a cave formation. They form when limestone is dissolved and percipitates into the opening of the cave, and as carbon dioxide evaporates, it mixes with Calcium to form CaCO3 in the form of either Calcite or Aragonite. This piece comes from the collection of Willard W. Wulff (1904-1998) of Colorado Springs, Colorado, a prominent figure and collector of Colorado minerals. Wulff was one of the founding members of the Colorado Springs Mineralogical Society in 1936. You can read Willard's bio on the Mineralogical Record website here ( http://www.minrec.org/labels.asp?colid=1528 ). The specimen comes with a typed label on the bottom of "Perky" box.