Rhodochrosite

Item Description

A lovely toenail sized piece from Santa Eulalia, which has produced some iconic Rhodochrosite specimens over the years, typically showing scalenohedral / "dogtooth" habit crystals. This piece dates back a few decades and features a handful of fine, sharp, translucent, pink-red colored crystals measuring up to 1.7 cm on matrix. The largest crystal is also doubly-terminated, for a nice touch. The prisms of the crystals have a gentle matte luster, but the pyramidal terminations have a contrasting glassy luster. The vast majority of the Rhodos are damage free, though I can see one cleaved crystal on the left side of the group. A very cool specimen with alluring crystals that would make a great addition to any worldwide Rhodochrosite suite or a collection of South American / Peruvian minerals.

From the collection of Armon McPherson, a retired physicist, now living in New Mexico. Armon received his PhD from North Carolina State University in 1985, and worked at the laser laboratory at the University of Illinois at Circle Center. In the summer of 1997, Armon moved to the Argonne National Laboratory where he worked at the Advanced Photon Source, then the world’s largest synchrotron facility dedicated as an x-ray source. In 2001, he was asked to join a team at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque to conduct laser research for DARPA. Finally, staying within Sandia, he transferred to the Z Facility, the world’s most powerful x-ray facility. He retired in the spring of 2017. Armon's introduction to mineral collecting came in the 1980s during graduate school when he attended his first mineral show. He took up the hobby of faceting gems, and focused his early collection on gem crystals, and later transitioned into collecting non-gem species. We are proud to offer specimens from his worldwide mineral collection here for you.