unusual 3-part Aquamarine "shards" crystal, ex James Carter Coll

Item Description

Where to start with this crazy unusual aquamarine? This piece consists of three floater and complete aquamarine crystals, each of which is a complete floating crystal individually; and yet they click together like a puzzle to create one larger crystal with more typical beryl crystal shape! The three pieces literally click together and stick tightly enough that you can sit it down and they stay together (and certainly, can show together in a base) as the larger whole. This is a phenomenon that happens very rarely in gem crystals including both beryls and kunzites (spodumenes), and of which I have seen a very few examples over the years. Sometimes, the crystals crack in situ exactly along one axis (due to heat and pressure, one would imagine) even as they are forming and growing, in a way that simply makes a hairline crack between the segments of the original crystal. Thus, each shard is a floater, and yet they are all constrained together such that the crack never opened widely enough beyond a hairline fracture to accumulate more material and create a gap between them. So, they sit there in the ground together for hundreds of millions of years until a human mines the crystal, picks it up, and finds that it is a jigsaw puzzle from the ground. This crystal is actually complete all around, except possibly for one concave area in the back that could be old damage, or a contact. It displays really nicely as "three-into-one" and we can arrange it like that on a custom lucite base, for example as shown in the photo with the shards standing vertically. That makes for a great educational and curiosity display, and certainly for an unusual addition to any gem crystal collection. Total mass is 297 grams. A fascinating mineral specimen(s) ! As to value, we have never seen something like this for sale.