Spinel

A single sharp black octahedral spinel intergrown with and attached to a minute a bit of forsterite. The faces have successive, stacked layers of parallel crystal growth. The crystal shows a bit of contact bruising on the back, hardly noticeable and the crystal remains a very good size for the locality.

From the well-known, now closed to collecting, locality known as the Parker Mine. The Parker Mine was originally opened to mine Mica in the early 1900s. This area is noted for the abundance of exceptionally large, well-formed crystals of various rock-forming minerals commonly found in the carbonate vein-dyke systems. The Parker mine has yielded large, euhedral crystals of altered forsterite up to 30 cm in size, and fine ferroan spinel crystals up to 6 cm. The area is one of regionally metamorphosed Precambrian sediments. The principal mineral occurrence lies within a green rock complex (metagabbro, calc-silicate, amphibole rock types) which may have formed as a result of igneous activity.