Emerald, Chamosite, Albite (rare combo)

Item Description

A highly unusual, showy and very rare combination specimen featuring colorful, lustrous green emerald crystals of mediocre quality, which serves as the background for superb, sharp crystals of chamosite, the iron analogue of clinochlore. The sharpest crystal here is a doubly-terminated, razor-sharp crystal measuring 1.7 cm across. Some of the pencil emeralds are actually quite gemmy. The background of glassy albite is a fine compliment. I had not seen these chamosites before from this productive emerald locality and was suspicious when first shown this piece as an "axinite", which generally would not occur with emerald. The identity was confirmed by RAMAN and X-RAY analysis in the lab of Dr. Robert Downs at University of Arizona. I think this is a quite good example of the species, and one wonders how many such crystals have been thrown away as rubbish in the mad search for crumpled green emeralds.