Baryte (rare locality specimen)

Item Description

A cool oddball locality specimen labeled simply as coming from "Lenwood", which is a small town in the Mojave Desert near Barstow, in San Bernardino County, California. It's the only specimen I can remember seeing labeled from this locality, though it might be from a more specific mine and the info was just a bit vague. With that said, the piece hosts attractive sharp, bladed crystals that are largely an off-white hue, but they have a contrasting orange deposition of presumably some kind of oxide to give the piece a beautiful two-tone appearance. The largest Baryte crystal measures 3.4 cm. The piece overall is in good condition, though there are a few broken crystals, so it's not completely pristine. If you're a worldwide Baryte collector or a fan of esoteric specimens from California, this is something interesting and unusual from an unlikely locale.
From the collection of Robert (Bob) Reynolds who passed in August of 2020. Bob was a well-known fossil and mineral expert and former Curator of Earth Sciences at the San Bernardino County Museum in California. The rare phyllomanganate-chromate species Reynoldsite was named in his honor in 2011.