Natural Curiosities Thread

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Colemanite. Boron, CA.

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>>2240996
I already made a thread where I showed my fossils, but I guess it won't hurt to post them here too.

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>>2240997

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>>2240998

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Eclogite, just about the highest grade of metamorphic rock there is.

>>2240998
Yeah I saw. Nice specimens.

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>>2241000
I can post a zoomed-in version of the amber if you'd like.

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>>2241001
Polished surface. The red spots are pyrope/almandine garnets.

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>>2241001
Thanks, these are really beautiful too.
I used to do minerals before I switched to fossils, don't have any pics as of now though.

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>>2241004
Oh shit, son, that's awesome!

This is probably my best one.

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Pyrophyllite. Indian Gulch, CA, near Cathay.

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>>2241009

>>2240998
fossilized shit?
from what?

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Ulexite, a naturally occurring fiberoptic. Boron, CA.

>>2241009
That's a nice fossil there. Great conversation piece. I'd love to see a closeup of the amber too.

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>>2241010
Those patterns are breathtaking, where did you find/buy this?

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>>2241012
I actually don't know, there was nothing else I could find around it.
It's a honest-to-god shitpost, though, eh?

>>2241013
Sure thing! Also, by fiberoptic, do you mean like if you shine a colored light at it it'll glow?

>>2241017

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>>2241024
Fuck, forgot to attach the image.

>>2241017
>It's a honest-to-god shitpost, though, eh?
kek

Would be even cooler if you would have known who produced this turd

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>>2241029
Probably some australian time traveler, I gotta go take a math exam though so I'll be right back, okay?

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Benitoite, a barium titanium cyclosilicate. Found only at one mine near the headwaters of the San Benito river. It occurs within natrolite veins penetrating a body of highly altered crossite-bearing serpentinite. The mine was tapped out some years ago and will no longer be producing on a commercial scale. Exploration for more deposits in the area has been severely limited by the discovery that soils in the area contain unsafe levels of asbestos. Many times rarer than diamond, I think its probably safe to say that this whopper cabinet size specimen is worth more than my car.

>>2241017
Yes. Perfect ulexite crystals are rather rare, but if you sawed off the matrix at both ends of this one and shined a flashlight on one end it would be able to transmit at least some of the light through.

As for the pyrophyllite, it came from the collection of Norm Nichols.

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>>2241035
Closeup showing the ideal habit, a triangular prism.

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>>2241037

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>>2241038
The green smears are malachite, produced by alteration of primary cupric minerals during the same hydrothermal processes that produced the rest of the vein fill. There are a few instances of unaltered copper minerals being found in association with benitoite, and at least one instance of native silver.

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Benitoite with neptunite. The two minerals are closely associated with one another, though some 10x as much neptunite as benitoite is found at the mine. While not the type locality, the Benitoite Mine was one of the first localities to produce large, well formed crystals of neptunite. The geologist who first discovered benitoite and some of its rarer associates initially mistook the neptunite crystals he was seeing as an entirely new mineral species because he'd never seen such euhedral specimens before.

>>2241003
Did you ask about buying a plant fossil in the general

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Massive fluorite in calcite.

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>>2241066
Fluoresces yellow under long wave UV.

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Yellow fluorite cubes.

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>>2241070
Fluoresces purple under lw UV

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"Uranium ore", presumably uraninite. Guarda Mining District, Portugal.

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>>2241074
Green fluorescence under lw UV.

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>>2241075
The other side is actually a lot richer...

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>>2241076
Closeup

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Scheelite, NJ.

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>>2241085
Green fluorescence under lw UV.

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Those of you who remember the Bruner collection threads, these are two of his fluorite specimens from Cumberland, England.

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>>2241113
Very intense blue fluorescence under lw UV.

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>>2241054
That was me, yeah.

>>2241085
Awesome!

>>2241085
>>2241114
Are these yours? Also, what's your favorite specimen?

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>>2240998
Here's one you might like. Found it when I was a kid working on a sheep ranch a long time ago.

Allosaurus coprolite, Morrison Formation, Jenson Utah.

If you look at the top of the right chunk you may notice a bone fragment, identifiable by the cell structure. Looks a bit like a spider web. Bone fragments in dinosaur shit indicate a large predatory theropod, of which Allosaurus was by far the most common in that fauna.

>>2241215
That's really cool, how did you know it was coprolite?

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>>2241215
a second shot of the same coprolite from another angle showing the longitudinal grain of the bone fragment.

>>2241221
I didn't know for sure until a paleontologist I showed it to pointed out the bone frags. I picked them up because they looked cool is all.

>>2241224
I noticed, that's some good shit right there.

>>2241197
I don't own them, I'm just their caretaker. They came from the estate of a recently passed collector who's stuff got donated to my department. You can see pictures of the cataloging process here

http://desuarchive.org/an/search/subject/Old%20Naturalist/type/op/

http://desuarchive.org/an/search/subject/Bruner/

Most of my own collection isn't nearly so nice.

>>2241372
Yeah, I posted in the last threads. I'm new to /an/, I mostly posted on /vp/ and /int/ before I found this.

I'm in university right now and I have access to the zoological collection of the biology department, I only have my shitty phone camera to take pictures with though.

Anyone interested? It's mostly skulls and invertebrates.

>>2241504
Sure

>>2241504
Yeah, absolutely!
I posted my fossils with an iPad camera, so don't feel bad, dude.

>>2241671
>>2241672
Well, it was too busy to take pictures today and I'm back home now. I will post some stuff on monday if this thread is still up.

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Elemental mercury oozing out of cinnabar ore. Sebastopol, Sonoma Co, CA.

>>2241504
Go for it. I'm doing this with a cell phone too.

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>>2241721

>>2241721
Aren't both of those poisonous?

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Calcite "Christmas Tree", made up of scalenohedrons (scalenohedra?).

>>2241726
Very. I really had to fight down my urge to lick everything I can get my hands on.

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Jackstraw cerussite. Mammoth Mine, Tiger, AZ.

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>>2241765
Dig this crystal habit.

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Prismatic calcite over hematite cores. Cumberland, England.

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Bicolor tourmaline. Pala Chief Mine, Pala, CA.

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Pink tourmaline, same locale.

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Aragonite, Aragon, Spain.

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Ramsdellite altering to pyrolusite. Stine Cabin, Lake Valley, NM.

>>2241774
I have arongonite from Marroc, it's red and has a ton of little hexagos and shit

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Stibnite. Locale unknown.
>>2241783
Post dat shit son.

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Native copper, Arizona.

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Wulfenite, Sierra de Los Lamentos, Chihuahua, Mexico. I keep calling the material coming out of there "Butterscotch Ore" but it hasn't really caught on yet.

>>2241784
It's at home, I will soon.

>>2241828
I can see where you get the name from. Keep trying, I'm sure it'll eventually catch on.

i fucking love rocks

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>>2241834
I mean we've already got "fat turkey ore"...

>>2241839
Haha, love it. Although I think turkey fat would sound better.

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Dioptase w/ plancheite, N'gouloukoutou River Area, Congo.

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Wulfenite, Red Cloud Mine, AZ.

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Barite overgrowth on fluorite. Locale unknown.

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>>2241903
little glimpse at the underlying fluorite

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Quartz stained w/ limonite. Locale unknown.

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Fluorite, Joplin, MO.

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>>2241911
Sort of a borg cube texture going on here.

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Golden barite. Locale unknown.

Is the Uranium ore safe to keep?

>>2242124
Yes. Normal interaction with typically sized uranium mineral specimens doesn't hit you with more radiation than riding in an airplane. So long as you don't sleep with it you'll be fine. The real threat with these things is the radon coming off them. If the container is sealed and you want to open it, you'll need to do so outside and step back from it. If not, it should be kept in a well ventilated room, which is what we've done here.

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A small garnet of mine.

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Another one

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Azurite.

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I don't really know what it is but it should be linked with iron.

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Serpentine

And a lot more but I can't really take a good picture and most aren't even with me right now so I'll leave it at that.

>>2242757
Andradite?

>>2242944
Don't know.
It is dodecahedral and mostly brownish~blackish.
I found it during a field trip among other garnets, but the others don't look like it. It was in the South East of Spain, if that matters.
And as I was only a student in geology, I never learned to differenciate between garnets.

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Here's something I actually own for a change. This is a "noodle tectonite" (not an official term), composed of members Cp7 (blue limestone), averaging 27 meters thick, and Cp8 (buff limestone), averaging 9 meters thick, from the Cambrian-age Poleta Formation. The protolith of this little chunk was right at the contact between the Poleta and the intruding Papoose Flats Pluton. When the pluton intruded it fell in and was repeatedly stretched and folded (like how pulled noodles at Chinese restaurants are made) as it underwent metamorphism, eventually producing this fold-y tiger stripe pattern.

>>2243121
Identifying garnets without ion probing or somesuch is risky business. The garnet structure is a total garbage can, and minute substitutions into the same general endmember formula can produce large variations in color. Some papers on the geologic history of the area might provide be a better way of figuring out what it is.

>>2243443
I'd do that if I know exactly where I found it, which isn't the case. I do know that it was in Andalousia but I've no clue besides that since it was probably outside the bound of the Bedar-Macael unit where I worked.
All in all, I don't really care about that and am just happy that this garnet had a growth that allowed its shape to be quit good. Part of it is as well defined as a crystal model, which is nice.

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Anyways, here's a piece of Magnetite I found in a conglomerate near El Pinãr de Bédar.

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>>2241898

Wow

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>>2241504
As promised.

Where do I even start?

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>>2243949
There is a lot more stuff in this room than I realized.

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>>2243950
And this isn't even the scientific collection, just the "oh we thought it's nice to have" part.

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>>2243951
Just yell stop if you see something interesting.

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>>2243959

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>>2243961

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>>2243962

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>>2243963

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>>2243964
Wait maybe I should open these.

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>>2243968

>>2243959
>>2243961
>>2243962
>>2243963
>>2243964
A L L
O F
I T

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>>2243969

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>>2243970
I'm not even done with the overview yet, chill out.

>>2243971
>dude I think your bird has autism

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>>2243972

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>>2243975

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>>2243977

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>>2243979

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>>2243980
I'll have to get the keys to this one.

shit is cool yo

>>2243972
look at that turtle dude

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>>2243983
While I go do that have a look at this malformed (cow?) skull with an extra upper mandible.

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>>2243985
Bottom view

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>>2243984
Well, it's a turtle.

No label or anything on it. I believe it's Chelonia mydas but I could be wrong. I'm not good at vertebrates.

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>>2243996

>>2243996
Wait, turtles are real??

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>>2243997
>kill meeeeee

>>2243998
Of course not anon, turtles are a conspiracy started by the jews.

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>>2244000
Don't think I'll be getting those keys today. Also I'm gonna head home soon. More stuff tomorrow. Take the time to look through what I posted and tell me what you want to see close ups of.

Also here is a collection of assorted jewel beetles (Buprestidae). Sorry for the shitty light and camera, they look a million times better in reality. (Also I have to say my personal collection is more impressive than this.)

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>>2244004
Various stag beetles and scarabs.

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>>2244005
Assorted "stuff".

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>>2244006
And the most common native butterflies

>>2243971
Hey when you can can you look at that leftmost crab

I want that kind of stuff in my home.

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An opalised shellfish fossil, one of my favourite pieces out of my collection.

>>2244117
That's cool, I love crystalized fossils.
I posted my pyritized ammonite, but there's a lot more cool stuff.

Also, I'll post more Petrified wood and fish fossils soon.

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>>2244117
>>2244119
>>2244120

That's badass anon.

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Because I bragged earlier that my Buprestid collection was more impressive than this one >>2244004. Well here it is, you be the judge.

No, they're not in a case right now, I ran out of room.

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>>2244197
And I needed more room to house these guys.

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>>2244199
One of these is not like the other

>>2244199
Where do you get this cool shit?

the internet?

>>2244243
Most of it.

>>2244248
sorry for being ignorant but where

>>2244260
For example:

thebugmaniac.com
insect-sale.com
And many other sites like this but I've had good experiences with those two. Also ebay if you're looking for more specific stuff.

>>2244268
thanks bro

>>2244270
If you want to properly mount and display them you're gonna need a bunch of other stuff too, including some knowledge on how to do it.

>>2244271
Got any tips/videos/reading material?

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>>2244276
http://bugguide.net/node/view/36900
http://www.thebugmaniac.com/index.cfm/page:how-to-mount-insects
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6Ca3ZuSAws

Read through these and watch the videos before you read this.

What the old man says is pretty much exactly how you do it.
These guides are mostly for butterflies because they're a lot harder to mount properly than beetles.
For beetles just try to get ones that weren't killed in alcohol as those get very stiff and brittle. Good shops will usually have a general disclaimer saying none of their specimen were killed in alcohol. If you get them just throw them in hot water. Wait until you can bend the legs. Take them out, let them dry thoroughly then put an appropriately sized needle (get sizes 0, 1, 2 and 3) through straight the right elytra so that it comes out without puncturing the coxa. This takes practice, you will fuck it up. You will fuck up the positioning too, you'll never get it 100% symmetrical but you should try your hardest. The more needles you have the better.

If you do butterflies definitely get a mounting board. You don't need special wax paper to mount the insects on or pin butterfly wings, baking paper will do just fine.

Also you don't need to dry for 3 weeks. 4-5 hours in a convection oven at 55 °C followed by another week outside is more than enough.

And most importantly LABEL EVERYTHING. You will the thankful, believe me.

>>2244325
Oh also the only special stuff you'll need to buy from an entomological supplier are the needles, nets and cases. Tweezers, ethyl acetate (if you plan on going out and collecting yourself) and so on you can just get on amazon.
Also special insect repair glue is a meme, just use superglue.

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>>2244325
>>2244328
Really helpful, thanks.

I have a female dynastes titus that I've had in my drawer for a while that I wanted to pin.

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>>2240998
OK, so how the hell do you know it's a coprolite? I have one that is supposed to be one and can't figure out what I'm looking at, pic related. Are the square looking bits prehistoric corn?

It's sitting on a 1" tungsten cube

I can post some more of mine if people are interested, nothing really bizarre or rare though.

>>2244454
To my knowledge the only way to know for sure is if you can positively ID bits of food in the mass. Otherwise it could be anything from a concretion to a fossil burrow.

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>>2244495
I'll probably have to find a palentologist then... No idea where to start there.

This is a selenite tower, not sure where it's from like most stuff I have.

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I have this big tooth I got from somebody when he was moving house and didn't want it, no idea what it's from. Some kind of large herbivore.

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Brecciated jasper ball. I want to make a ball forming machine some time and do my own out of random stones.

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This is supposedly galena, but it looks more like hematite to me, can somebody who knows what they're looking at give me anything definite? It's heavy as hell, so I'm thinking it might actually be galena but I've only seen hematite in this shape before.

>>2244507
Looks bovine to me.

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This is a large weird shaped dark garnet, no idea where it's from or what the inclusion is, it was given to me.

>>2244510
It looks like it but it's way fucking bigger than any cow tooth I've ever seen, and I've had a few cow skulls. That's the same 1" tungsten cube next to it.

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Borax crystal, Blow Hole Site, Searles Lake, Trona, CA.
>>2244513
It's a fossil, not modern, right? Maybe it came from some megafauna in the same clade?

>>2244619
The tooth isn't a fossil, no.

Sweet borax crystal. Is it really soft?

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>>2244619
Compare that to this crystal from the same site. Borax occurs as clear crystals, then turns white on exposure to air. I got this one when it was fresh out of the ground. The white portion was facing up in the air and the clear portion was protected by the mud. I tucked it into a plastic bag as soon as I picked it up as an experiment to see if I could make it stay clear. Seems to be working, over a week now and no apparent change.

>>2244623
Between at least 2 or 2.5 on the Moh's scale (can't scratch it with my fingernail), which is in line with the established properties of the mineral. I'm sure if I got my calcite sample out I could scratch it but I don't want to damage it.

>>2244631
You're lucky to live somewhere you can go and pick up minerals off the ground.

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Also from the Blow Hole: Cubic halite w/ some mud inclusions and a bit of faint zoning.

>>2244632
There's something good to be found everywhere, just gotta keep your ear to the ground.

>>2244633
This is southern Louisiana, I'd need an excavator and a large pumping station. Best I can do is look for shit in the river.

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Twinned, bi-terminated hanksite, from the same locale as the above specimens.

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>>2244638
Hanksite barrel prism.

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>>2244639
Cluster of scores of small hanksite crystals intergrown w/ small amounts of halite and borax.

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Keeping with the evaporites theme: Gypsum evaporites from the surface of a sag pond along the San Andreas Fault in the Carrizo Plain, near Taft, CA. The guy I was working under when I found this mentioned that the site had been worked as commercial source of gypsum in the late 1800s, but I can't recall much of the details.

>>2244509
It really does look like hematite to me, the reddish portions in particular, but galena can manifest as botryoids too. Two things you can do to check. First and easier, do a streak plate test with some innocuous portion of the specimen. Galena streaks silver-grey, hematite red. If you don't want to damage the specimen at all you could try getting a rough measurement of the volume and weighing it. Galena is usually over 7 grams per cubic cm, while hematite is about 5 and a half.

>>2245007
hurr durr that should have been the first thing I did. Didn't even cross my mind, thanks. It's a red brown, so definitely hematite, I'll need to relable my file.

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Greisen, a self-altered granite formed by degassing of the last bit of melt in an intruding pluton. The liberated fluids end up in vugs after picking up various elements as they traveled through the rest of the rock, where they cause hydrothermal alteration, producing micas and halides, especially fluorite.

Grainsgill, Lake District, UK.

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>>2245117
The mica clusters on this remind me of those hasselback potatoes that everyone's creaming their jeans over lately

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Good news, my old supe had an old handheld combo lw-sw UV lamp lying around, so now I can make a lot more mineral fluoresce.

Aragonite w/ uranyl-activated fluorescence, Sonora, Mexico.

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>>2245205

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Zircons in dolomite, Kovdor, Russia.

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>>2245208
Gold-yellow fluorescence under sw UV

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Svabite and calcite, Langban, Sweden.

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>>2245218
The svabite fluoresces orange, the calcite red.

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Calcite and hydrozincite, Beaver, Utah.

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>>2245231
The orange-red fluorescence is the calcite and the light blue is the hydrozincite.

I did not know calcite was flourescent

>>2245237
Not always, it depends on impurities or inclusions.

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>>2244004
I am back and I have acquired keys and a proper camera.

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>>2245528
The battery is completely empty though and it's probably gonna be charging for at least 2 hours, which means only phone pics today.

>>2244011
Here is your crab. This is the one you meant right? It's Hyas araneus, the great spider crab. Like this one they are usually densely colonoized by barnacles. This is delibarate and part of their camouflage. They also camouflage theselves with parts of seaweed that they stick on the spikes at the front of their carapace.

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>>2245533

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>>2245534

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>>2245535
The corpses of my bretheren surround me. There are thousands of them. The lights don't work down here anymore. I can feel their pain. I can feel the warp overtaking me. It is a good pain.


I can take this time to look through the hundreds of display cases I guess. If you want to see something specific just say so, it's probably somewhere in here. Not down to species or genus level of course but something like "show us some wasps" will work.

>>2245536
How about some moths?
Thanks in advance

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>>2245544
I can only show parts of this collection. I seem to have severely underestimated the size. For example here is an entire cabinet full of cases full of Noctuidae (owlet moths).

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>>2245568
Some of these are in pretty bad condition and not very well organized or even labeled.

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>>2245570
Here are some Sphingidae. Sphinx ligustri and Agrius convolvuli.

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>>2245573
Another mixed case with Sphingidae, Arctiidae, Noctuidae and others. And also some butterflies.
Coolest thing in here are probably these Tyria spec., their caterpillars eat ragwort (Senecio jacobaea specifially) and accumulate the toxins until they become really fucking toxic themselves. This extends to the adult butterfly which has this bright red and black warning coloration.

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>>2245576
Most cases of course look like this. The majority of moths aren't very spectacular.

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>>2245577
More mostly Sphingidae. Looks like someone puked in here.

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>>2245578
We apparently have another separate butterfly collection though, and that is a reference collection. Everything in here is absolutely fucking perfect, labeled and sorted.
I think I'm in love.

Here are some Arctiidae/Arctiinae.

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here's my Acherontia atropo.

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>>2245579
This is probably my favorite case so far so its a real shame I only now noticed how shit this image is. Will definitely try to take some better once tomorrow.

I should add all of these are native (meaning central europe). I haven't even looked at the tropical collection yet.

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>>2245581
Oh right, there were more Arctiidae in that one.

Clearwing moths (Sesiidae) in here. Last image for today. I sadly have actual shit to do now.

>>2245582
bee mimics are so cool

>>2241771
beautiful. Looks like candy

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Franklinite in albite, Franklin, NJ.

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>>2245784
Albite fluoresces red, franklinite green. Basically a naturally occurring Christmas decoration.

This is all really cool, I ought to get off my ass and take some more pictures of mine. I have some stuff that I have no idea what it is

>>2245785
Forgot, pretty sure the fluorescence in the feldspar is because of Fe substituting for Al

>>2245579
I do love a well-labelled display.

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I think this might be limonite, but I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure it's not sulfur as it has no smell at all and is fairly hard.

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This, I have no idea what it is.

>>2245862
That looks an awful lot like orpiment w/ realgar to me. What did you use to test the hardness? You've been washing your hands after handling it right?

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>>2245872
I wash my hands after handling anything that I'm not sure what it is, yeah.

I thought this was too interesting not to keep a piece of, it's scale out of an old hot water heater. At first I thought somebody had filled it up with rocks and sand before I cut it open.

>>2245872
I tested the hardness with my fingernail vs a block of sulfur that I have

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>>2245880
Try a piece of calcite (3 on the hardness scale). Orpiment is a 2-2.5, as is a human fingernail, and sulfur is a 1.5-2.5. Limonite on the other hand is a 4-5.5. I would have guessed orpiment + realgar based on the luster and that combination of yellow + that shade of red

>>2244204
Is that an albino praying mantis?
Seriously just what popped into my head.
Awesome pics, i think thread is at cap.

Where Mr. Bruner's cornmeal nightmare, did I miss it?

>>2245892
It's still slowly coming off, a little tiny bit at a time, but my impatience is getting to me. I've seriously contemplated putting the specimen in a bucket of water with some brine shrimp and letting them pick the cornmeal off.

>>2245892
Not an albino, just a regular adult male of Hymenopus coronatus. They're white naturally.
I still have to mount the female at some point but I'm a lazy fuck.

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>>2245900
forgot pic

>>2244204
Is that an actual Ornithoptera in there? Holy fuck anon. How?

>>2245882
Oh shit it is very easily scratched with calcite. I have been handling this thing since I was a kid.

>>2244506
>No idea where to start there.
Vertebrate paleontologist checking in.

the other anon is correct, we can't tell unless it contains traces of food, either molecular or microscopic, or more often just big ol' chunks of bone or plant.

Most of the stuff sold as coprolite is just plain agate from the Morrison Formation of Utah and Colorado. It COULD be coprolite, but there's no reason to think it is and certainly no way to prove it is.

as the anon says, it could as easily just be a burrow infill or random agate nodule. More often it's a clast from some alluvium that likely had its genesis long before the dinosaurs evolved. A fossil rock if you will.

Yours looks typical. It may or may not be a coprolite, there's no way to know. Probably not, most of the known coprolites aren't agatized. Though that could be an artifact of the problem that agate doesn't usually preserve cellular structures so IF a coprolite were agatized we probably couldn't ID it anyways.

>>2245957
Awesome, thanks for the info

>>2245941
Well if you're washing your hands after handling it you should be fine. Orpiment may be toxic but like any other arsenic compound you need regular long term exposure to pose a serious threat.

One thing I would recommend though is to avoid exposing it to light for long periods of time. Realgar alters to pararealgar (which in old literature you may find misidentified as orpiment) over time when exposed to light. The realgar inclusions in your specimens aren't that euhedral or anything, so its not a major loss in itself if they deteriorate, but pararealgar is very friable and it may compromise the specimen's structural integrity.

>>2246045
It's in my room which is pretty dark most of the time, should I keep it in the closet with the azurite? lights are only on when I'm painting miniatures and they're facing my desk

>>2246062
Couldn't hurt

>>2246004
you're welcome.

identifiable terrestrial Mesozoic coprolites are actually pretty rare. Far less common than meteorites or gold nuggets, for example. I've never actually seen one for sale. I'd guess they'd sell for hundreds of dollars, perhaps thousands.

marine coprolites and coprolites from more recent times are a lot more common.

new thread?

>>2243980

>dat fox

Thanks for still posting these threads OP, I've thanked you before but your OC really is lifeblood for this board.

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Just got this nautilus shell for my collection. I know it's a controversial issue of owning one, but I wanted to keep one before the shit hits the fan.

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Here's one of mine: chrysocolla from Baghdad Mine, AZ.

>>2246205
I suppose we should next week if people still have stuff to show.

>>2246898
Your enthusiasm is greatly appreciated

>>2247002
Gotta mount dat shit son.

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Okenite

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Hey rock bros!

I'm not really all that knowledgeable about this stuff, so I figured I'd ask you guys. My sister gave me a chunk of amethyst (supposedly, I'm not sure if it's genuine) and it's kind of... sticky. I was thinking maybe the shop put some sort of sealant on it or something.

Anyway, should I just wash it off with soap and water? Or leave it sticky?

>>2247002
I did. I would post pic, but we've hit image limit.

>>2247741
Woops, I replied to myself, >>2247588

>>2247731
Amethyst isn't naturally sticky, washing it off won't hurt it. That sounds gross.

>>2247731
>sticky
What the fuck.
Is it the type of sticky where you left a lollipop in the hot summer sun and forgot about it for half an hour, or some other type of sticky?

>>2244117
that's pretty rad anon

I once saw a fossil bivalve with some black crystals in it on a site about 10 years ago. Sadly I was a poorfag at that time so I could not buy it. Still feel bad about it to this day.

>>2247753
Okay, thanks, I'll give it a rinse.

>>2247758
It's a kind of slimy-sticky, like you find on old plastic toys and such.

>>2240996

The best I have is a fossil sea urchin and a couple giant clam shells (the latter being technically illegal to possess in the Philippines, but fuck our DENR) but I left them back in my apartment when I went home for break.

>>2247002
I haven't heard of any controversy. Enlighten me please?

>>2247932
It's the export of nautilus shells that has led the risk of extinction. It's becoming a loud topic in the small community that the export of nautilus shells should be banned.

>>2247943
I see. Thanks

>>2242295
I bought some and then threw it out after it arrived, because it freaked me out a little bit. I guess I overreacted. Also it was a waste of money

>>2245580
It puts the lotion in the basket

>>2241033
equine front right mciii?

>>2241035
Holy shit. I've only seen that much Benitoite in museums before...

>>2249762
New therad.