Detailed information
Dimensions
80 x 115 x 48
mm
Weight
422 g
Locality
Vishnevye Mountains Chelyabinsk Oblast' Southern Urals, Russia
Condition
No recorded repairs
Pyrochlore is a fairly complex oxide containing sodium, calcium, fluorine and niobium and is the niobium end-member of the Pyrochlore supergroup. This outstanding cabinet specimen is from the Vishnevye Mountains in the Southern Urals of Russia; the exact locality is unknown. If you look up this locality in Mindat you will see two very different sites within the Vishnevye Mountains; one an abandoned old quarry nestling in woodland, of Tolkienesque appearance, and the other, more fitting to Star Wars, showing the massive modern-day quarry on Karavai Mountain. Neither photo helps identify where this specimen originated, but they are interesting and lie relatively close to where it was mined. It’s an amazingly rich specimen, the 11 x 6 cm display surface encrusted with superb octagonal Pyrochlore crystals, often truncated at the apex. The crystals, typically around 1 cm wide, are waxy and resinous with a super reflective glassy lustre. Every prism is a mixture of mainly opaque Pyrochlore mottled with translucent patches which glow in shades of cinnamon-orange. These crystals are surrounded by snow white Calcite and sit on a speckled white and black matrix of nepheline-syenite Fenite, an extremely rare metasomatic alteration product.
