Sulfur (good sized crystal)

Item Description

The western half of Bolivia can be a fairly inhospitable place, but the big dry western desert is the source of some of the best and most well-known Sulfur crystals in the world. Now Sulfur is at its best from various localities in Sicily, and while the Bolivian crystals are not the same habit/style, they occur in notably large bright yellow single crystals and clusters (typically bigger than their Sicilian cousins) and rarely on matrix. This specimen is a good sized bright "canary" yellow, lustrous, gemmy/translucent crystal of Sulfur with pronounced "hoppered" or skeletal faces, free of matrix. The hollow growth is due to the fact that these crystals grow so rapidly that they cannot "fill in" all the way while they're forming. These pieces are beloved by collectors for their size and wonderful morphology. It should be noted that Sulfur is notorious for turning sulfide minerals black upon exposure, so keep your Pyrites, Galenas, Chalcopyrites, etc. away from native Sulfur in order to maintain their metallic beauty. For reference, this species should be spelled S-U-L-F-U-R (not sulphur) as both the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry along with the British Royal Society of Chemistry adopted this spelling in the 1990s (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur#Spelling_and_etymology). Wikipedia also states that, "Sulfur is derived from the Latin word sulpur, which was Hellenized to sulphur in the erroneous belief that the Latin word came from Greek."