Lepidolite ps. After Tourmaline (Ed Swoboda Coll.)

Item Description

This is certainly one of the most unusual tourmaline pseudomorphs you will ever see! Brown columnar lepidolite has pseudomorphed a large sculptural section of a heavily etched blocky tourmaline crystal from the famous Pederneira Mine. The striking "cityscape" architecture of the top adds real pizzazz to this VERY RARE older pseudo from this famous mine. It has 360-degree presence. Exceptional material from the Ed Swododa Pseudomorph Collection. Ed, who lived from 1917-2013, was one of the United States most successful field collectors. He traveled worldwide and found the world's finest brazilianites in 1945. Ed purchased the Stewart, Tourmaline Queen and Pala Chief pegmatite mines and was part of the renowned "bluecap" tourmaline discovery in 1972 at the Queen. Later projects included boleite and cumengite from the Amelia Mine in Mexico, famous purple adamites from the Ojuela Mine in 1982 and wulfenite and mimetite from the San Francisco Mine in 1989. He assembled several world-class mineral collections (with the famous Alma Queen rhodochrosite), including a superb pseudomorph collection, started in about 1984 and sold in the late 1990s and dispersed in the early 2000s. This is an outstanding example from the collection. Read Ed's biography in the Mineralogical Record Biographical Archive: http://www.minrec.org/labels.asp?colid=630.