Pyrite - unusual pinnacle growth

Item Description

Pyrite from Huaron is probably the most common pyrite on the market and yet, the locality continues to surprise us with diversity and styles, year after year. That being said, most material from here consists of more or less, isolated or conjoined crystals on matrix of quartz, rock, or other pyrite. They look like they form in actual mineral veins and cracks from hot fluids. Formations like this, which look like a stalactite or a fumarole product of other minerals that form around hot vents, are exceedingly rare. This is a strange shape, like a vertical tower of crystals tapering to the top, and it looks exactly like the kind of crystal growth you might expect around a hot vent for sulfur or such minerals, and not like a normal pyrite growth at all. It does not properly seem to be a stalactite from water processes, but something "different" and we really do not have a good idea about how it might have formed (although it was suggested to me that this could be a natural result of a second impulse flow of hot fluids into an existing pocket, melting the existing wall-lining of pyrite and allowing the material to be repurposed into a stalactite-like growth as the solution slowly cooled again). While it did not fit into any suite of the many suites in the Meieran collection, he purchased it and kept it many years because, in the words of this former head of Intellectual Development for Intel: "It is just so cool." He is right, it really is. Sparkly, too!