Coral Carving

Item Description

Here we have an attractive hand-carved piece of Coral from Indonesia with a lovely orange hue. There is a bit of a debate here as to which animal this carving is supposed to represent. Several people have chimed in, and we've had votes for hippopotamus, pig, dog, rodent, and I suppose that's part of the beauty of the piece, everybody sees something different in it. I think it's an intriguing and unusual piece of art, completely one-of-a-kind, and certainly distinctive. Specimen weight is 171.1 grams.
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.