Muscovite pseudmorph after Andalusite (rare locality specimen)

Item Description

A showy, and very hard to find big cabinet sized specimen from the renowned Champion Mine featuring pseudomorphs of prismatic Andalusite crystals which have been replaced by silvery colored shimmering Muscovite on Quartz matrix. The largest pseudomorph measures 6.0 cm long. It's the only specimen of its kind that I can remember seeing from the locality, and while I've seen un-pseudomorphed Andalusites from the Champion Mine, this specific replacement seems to be exceedingly rare. The crystals are not fully terminated, they are essentially crystal sections (prism), and there are a few impressions in the Quartz where crystals once grew, but are no longer present, leaving geometric "casts" behind. A cool piece to add to any suite of Champion Mine speicmens.
Ex George Loud Collection No. 458 CA.3; 6095 George (born August 16, 1942) is a well-known mineral collector from Washington, DC and South Carolina respectively, and was a patent lawyer by trade for over 50 years. He assembled one of the great mineral collections in the U.S., comprising worldwide specimens, and in later years he sold the worldwide specimens to focus on minerals of the United States, specifically locality suites with an emphasis on amazing representation of species while still maintaining fine quality. The specimens remarkably range from micros to all the way up to large cabinets in size. We recently acquired most of his impressive 9000+ piece collection, and the VAST majority of these pieces will be offered here in the auctions, as we feel that everyone deserves and equal opportunity at acquiring these important, well-documented and fine quality specimens for their collections.
See: https://mineralogicalrecord.com/biographies_labels/george-loud for more information