White Coral

Item Description

This is a big, alluring, beautiful and seldom seen specimen of branching White Coral from the Philippines. Sometimes this material is fossilized, but I truly don't think the piece is a fossil, but rather just a well-preserved example of this notably attractive material. Coral is one of those items that is closely tied to mineral collecting, but it's important to note that Coral is not a mineral or even a plant, but a marine invertebrate. Scientists were confused over fossilized Coral for years, and would actually classify them with minerals and rocks. Famed mineralogist James Dwight Dana even wrote about coral in in his work on mineralogy. With that said, Coral is not a mineral (though when it is fossilized it does become replaced by a mineral). This specimens featuring gentle slightly swirling striations along the "branches" of the Coral which are beautiful in person, and they almost remind one of the lines seen in someone's fingerprints. The piece has a pleasing, soft almost "ash"-like color with very slight lavender hints here and there. The wonderful overall shape of the piece combined with the fact that this is something that we've never had to offer in the auctions, makes it a very desirable specimen in my mind.
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.