rare Acicular Pyrite crystals

Item Description

VERY RARE acicular pyrite crystals! Not only are these rare for the species, but pyrite itself is quite rare for this locality so it is doubly-uncommon. In fact, this is the only such example I have seen for sale, and I find it highly interesting because as common as pyrite is in the world, you would think if it COULD form this habit, it would do so more commonly?! But this seems not the case. Giorgio Spiga, an Italian collector, has corrected my original locality label here and informed me these were found in 1972-1973, originally sold as millerite! He says: "Some years later some specimens were analysed at the University of Modena and officially classified as Pyrite by the academic temple of the science."...and further "These crystals look as acicular at a first observation, with needles up to than 1 cm, but using a microscope or a good loupe it is easy to realize that we are in presence of an extreme phase of skeletal crystals formation."