Turquoise pseudo. after Fossil Teeth

Item Description

This is a spectacularly well-preserved fossil jaw fragment where the teeth and bone (made of apatite) has been at least mostly replaced by the related species turquoise and turned into a mineral specimen. The shape and size of the teeth to 1 cm are well-formed and appealing visually, and these are some of the rarest and most desirable mineralized fossils you will ever see. According to other information out there by googling and found this, courtesy of Jasun McAvoy quoting a source as collector Yi Sun: "such teeth pieces are also found at the prehistoric dump in the mining district of Schwarzleo (Austria) which dates from the middle Bronze Age, around 1500 B.C. They are pig teeth, probably the leftovers of a miner's meal at that time... The whole dump is blue and green in its interior, as Cu-and As-bearing solutions deriving from the weathering of fahlore circulate through the tailing material and covered every rock with secondary crusts. At my last visit around ten years ago, I also found one of these teeth after digging ~2m into the dump". This came to us from a small private collection of such rare mineralized fossils and was best in the lot. Lesser examples than this one have occasionally sold in our auctions and others, publicly, in the $5000-8000 range.