Beryl var: Emerald

Item Description

A robust full-sized cabinet specimen from this well-known Emerald-producing part of the Brazil featuring several sharp, well-formed hexagonal prisms measuring up to 2.1 cm, sitting on light grey Quartz and silvery-grey schist matrix. The main Emerald crystal is fully-terminated and even shows good color with backlighting, but the other Emeralds are contacted, so not fully complete. These specimens are much rarer than their more famous Colombian cousins, and they are not often found in big cabinet pieces like this with terminated crystals, as the bigger specimens often will get carved or cut up into pieces. From what I have been told, this is actually the world's largest Emerald deposit, but good specimens are still quite rare on the market. Highly representative of the species and locality.
From the collection of Armon McPherson, a retired physicist, now living in New Mexico. Armon received his PhD from North Carolina State University in 1985, and worked at the laser laboratory at the University of Illinois at Circle Center. In the summer of 1997, Armon moved to the Argonne National Laboratory where he worked at the Advanced Photon Source, then the world’s largest synchrotron facility dedicated as an x-ray source. In 2001, he was asked to join a team at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque to conduct laser research for DARPA. Finally, staying within Sandia, he transferred to the Z Facility, the world’s most powerful x-ray facility. He retired in the spring of 2017. Armon's introduction to mineral collecting came in the 1980s during graduate school when he attended his first mineral show. He took up the hobby of faceting gems, and focused his early collection on gem crystals, and later transitioned into collecting non-gem species. We are proud to offer specimens from his worldwide mineral collection here for you.