Cryolite (ex Russ Behnke and David Burgess Collections)

Item Description

This is an attractive specimen featuring a mass of solid white Cryolite associated with greenish-brown rhombs of Siderite from the famous type locality for Cryolite in Greenland. If you look closely, you can see the Cryolite shows minor semi-crystalline faces in areas, but it's mostly massive. The Siderite crystals measure up to 2.1 cm, but the majority of them seem to be cleaved. From the worldwide collection of David Burgess (1951-2016). David was a prolific species collector from Newington, Connecticut, and the namesake for the extremely rare cobalt arsenate species Burgessite, which he discovered. The piece comes with a 3x5 card label that states it was part of the Manley Collection in Duke University in North Carolina.