Spangolite (collected by Fred Pough and Mark Bandy in 1959)

Item Description

Spangolite is one of the most highly sought after rarities from the southwestern United States. It's quite difficult to get your hands on a good specimen, as very little is available these days. This toenail sized specimen features attractive blue-green colored "crusts" of Spangolite on matrix, but the key feature of the specimen is that there are several excellent quality, well-formed, trigonal micro crystals that show an intense blue color with good internal gemminess when backlit. We have photographed the piece with a Canon MP-E 65mm macro lens to better illustrate the quality. If the quality of the crystals were not enough, this piece has an important historical significance, as it was collected in 1959 by the legendary Fred Pough and Mark Bandy, two of the most accomplished US mineralogists of the 20th century. You can read their biographies on the Mineralogical Record website ( https://mineralogicalrecord.com/labels.asp?colid=90 ) ( https://mineralogicalrecord.com/labels.asp?colid=583 ). We purchased this specimen from a pair of good friends in Tucson who informed us that Pough and Bandy collected it. The piece looks beautiful up close, and if you collect secondary copper minerals, micros or minerals of New Mexico, you need to have one of these in your collection. Its value is only amplified by the fact that it passed through the hands of two mineralogical icons.