Elbaite Tourmaline ex Richard Mushlitz coll.

Item Description

This specimen is part of the 2021 Dallas Mineral Collecting Symposium benefit auction, with proceeds benefiting Mineralogical Record, Rocks & Minerals, Tucson Gem and Mineral Society, and mindat.org. Thanks to all of our participants!

Billing for this auction will occur on Monday, August 23, for payment using PayPal or a credit card. Shipping will be billed at cost.

A solid 659 gram (approx 2 pounds in weight!) single huge crystal of classic red-pink-green multicolored tourmaline from this famous USA gem locality! This is a huge display specimen with great color zoning, and particularly rich green inside under the pink and red layers from the bottom, you can look in and see some of the green zones are surely cutting rough). This is likely very old material, probably from the turn of the 1900s era of mining here, although we cannot prove it for sure. It is the wrong shape for the modern discoveries in this past two decades, and the wrong style for the 1960s find here, so it is a logical assumption that it predates all of those. We found this, dirty and covered with a rusty iron coating, in the Richard Mushlitz Collection when we purchased it. It had never been cleaned until now. The cleaning reveals a complete top termination made of hunfdreds of small secondary faces - not the sharpest, but intact. The bottom, surprisingly, turns out to be crystallized itself, as it looks like the heavy crystal broke during formation and then fluids in the pocket "rehealed" over the break, thus giving the bottom a complex termination and making this, technically, a floater all around. Donated to the Symposium Auction in memory of Richard "Dick" Mushlitz, one of the earlier collectors we all knew on the internet in the 1990s, though he had been collecting long before that. Value???