Quartz replacing Anhydrite on Quartz

Item Description

A beautiful small cabinet sized specimen from the famous Cement Creek area that produced some of the lesser known Quartz "casts" from the state. For years, people have written that these epimorphs were replacements of Quartz after Barite, but Brian Kosnar contested that this couldn't be the case, and that the "casts" were most likely after Anhydrite. Finally, it appears that somebody else is on board with Brian we read from Bill Dameron on mindat that "Dr. Virgil Lueth, New Mexico Tech, concludes from studies (as-yet unpublished paper 4/2011) that these and all San Juan quartz epimorphs apparently after barite are in fact after anhydrite". This piece features a few casts of "sugary" Quartz replacing Anhydrite with additional "sugary" Quartz crystals on orange spherical Quartz matrix. Beautiful aesthetics and very eye-catching. Collected by Robert Stoufer in 2009.