Detailed information
Species
Native Palladium
Dimensions
17 x 17 x 7
mm
Weight
2 g
Locality
Nizhnii Tagil Sverdlovsk Oblast Russia
Condition
No recorded repairs
A single, 1.0 x 0.9 mm wide grain of Native Palladium is mounted in a 16 mm diameter resin polished block. It is from Nizhnii Tagil in Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia, which is a famous Platinum mining area. This style of polished mount requires a specialist reflected light microscope in order to study the grains and the reflectance produced by metallic minerals under plane polarized and cross polarized light. Often, even optical identification is a challenge and so polished blocks are usually studied chemically using a Scanning Electron Microscope. This is not our usual type of specimen, but included due to its rarity. This sample comes with a previous printed collection label from Austria, but prior to that it was also owned by Dr. Hans-Jurgen Wilke (1925-2014). The overall measurements provided indicate the size of the polished block.
