Ojuela SCORODITE!

I have recently had rather good luck in obtaining relative unobtainables— phosphophyllite, nikischerite, and now I am pleased to offer these Ojuela scorodites.   I would say that there are two species from the prolific Ojuela mine that top the desirability rankings in the minds of most collectors— one is legrandite, and the other is scorodite.  Of the two, scorodite is by far the more difficult to obtain, with notable finds in the 80’s, and only a couple minor discoveries since.  In contrast, legrandite tends to pop up randomly in the mine— one can be digging for adamite an suddenly come across one; there are indicator minerals that may hint at the correct conditions for its formation, but in general there is no particular zone or level to which they are confined.

Scorodite however, is much rarer. Even the slightest bit of this stuff on matrix seems to cause excitement (and correspondingly high prices) but in looking around a the few other examples available online, I do feel I am offering a hell of a lot more bang for the buck…. I would even say I’m pricing them better than specimens from less desirable localities like Morocco.   

The pieces on this page are greatly filtered down for quality— the majority of material had ugly brown crystals that I suspect had already altered (at least on the surface) to limonite or that were not suitable for specimens. In fact, a good portion of what I obtained ended up in the dumpster.  Blue-ish green examples were very few-- in fact, there was only one piece with crystals as good as OSC01.  There is a reason why so little of this material is available, and why it is so celebrated. 

And on that note: most of the pieces on this page show some degree of blue coloration— those that are just black or brown are noted as such. For the ones that *do* have some blue however, please note that they are color change and *EXTREMELY* sensitive to lighting type.  As I write this, I have the flat sitting next to the window in indirect morning sunlight, and in a number of cases many look even bluer than in the pictures.  Under incandescent light the same piece looks a dull grayish brown.  Oddly enough, the color is different under more direct sunlight as well…. I spent a good portion of yesterday working on these pictures, and I find that the specimens I worked on in the evening (next to my west-facing window) were calibrated to show a color worse than how they now appear the next morning (in more indirect sunlight.)