Best J Minerals - Welcome

In this forum we hope to create articles with pictures about all minerals beginning with the letter B. You are welcomed and encouraged to help create content for this and all the Best Mineral forums. You are encouraged to use the approximate format that has already been developed and exampled in the more extensively developed examples in the Best A Minerals forum. If you would like to take a crack at creating content for a particular mineral, please read over the suggestions and example in the sticky message at the top of the A minerals forum and then add it to this thread entry and I will work with you and walk you through any problems you may encounter. Ill also create a thread entry for the mineral you want to work on and help get you started. You will not be able to create new threads in this forum, unless you are approved as a moderator of the Best Minerals forum. If you have something you think is worth adding to the thread about a particular mineral, just make a thread entry about it, and Ill add it into the thread for that particular entry or at leas ask you for more information about it. There is a huge amount of work to do, so lets get started.

Ideally what we want to know about each significant mineral from each locality is:

1. What is the largest crystal of the mineral that the locality has produced?
2. What do the best specimens from this locality look like and where can one be seen?
3. Does the locality produce a variety of different kinds of specimens of this species, and what do the best of each type look like and how many of them were found etc.
4. What are the associated minerals found with this species and what is its geological setting?
5. How abundant are these specimens and when were they found? A type locality? In other words, how rare are they.
6. How do they compare to other specimens of the same mineral from other localities?
7. How much is it worth. This should probably be optional, but in cases where specimens are worth thousands of dollars we should probably say something of the value of these things.
8. What kind of care and feeding do these specimens require? Are they delicate, radioactive, unstable, color changeable etc.?
9. Are the specimens commonly faked, and if so, how to tell if they are?
10. Are there any interesting stories relating to the collecting of these specimens or their discovery as a new mineral?

Of course this is in reality impractical, but if we keep these questions in mind, we will do a lot better job when writing about them.

Rock Currier
Crystals not pistols.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/19/2009 05:17PM by Rock Currier.

Just had a granddaughter name Jade. I was hopping to see some photos of jade. Did not happen. Any help would be great. Thank you

Guy,

These articles are mostly about individual minerals and we will probably never have a best mineral article specifically named Jade. This is because the name jade has historically been a real hodge pod of minerals, and the name jade has been used used for several minerals. Jadeite and Actinolite, variety nephrite, are the main two minerals that are used by the mineral community to describe the group of minerals that are used to label pictures of jade. The reason for this is that Jade is such an ill defined term that over the years it has been used to describe almost any kind of pretty rock though most commonly green ones. Certainly there will be a Best Minerals Jadeite article some day as soon an interested, knowledgeable person gets around to writing it. The number of Best Minerals articles are growing slowly but the project is really just getting started with less than 10% of the "official" mineral names represented by articles about them. There is already an article written on Best Minerals about Actinolite though only a few if the specimens pictured there are specifically abut Actinolite variety nephrite. There are some that believe strongly that even Actinolite should not be a species name and it should be eliminated and combined with Tremolite. Whether you would like to see this done or not depends if you are the splitter or lumper philosophy. In Mindat's general gallery contains more than 300,000 images. Selected images from the general gallery are used to supply the images for the Best Minerals, but just the best specimens are used in the Best Minerals articles. Please note the difference between Mindat's general gallery and just the images in Best Minerals which is a subset of the Images in Mindat's general gallery. There are some pictures of cut and polished Jadeite and I personally feel that there should be at least ten times more than there are currently. Most books on jade have many more pictures of jade (Jadeite and Actinolite var. nephrite0 than we currently have here on mindat. The reason for this is that most of the people who have submitted images to Mindat's image bank are mineral collectors, mineral dealers, mineralogists and geologists. A very high percentage of these people feel that cut and polished examples of Jadeite and Actinolite var. nephrite are not real minerals and therefore should not be featured on Mindat almost to the point where the purists rate them as non minerals. The same goes for gemstones although gemstones are often better characterized than images of Jadeite and Actinolite var. nephrite. Pictures of cut and polished Jadite and. Actinolite var. nephrite are frequently rocks and and contain several different minerals and are not pure minerals at all. In their rough form, what ever mineral or rock for which the name jade has been used, it is often very unattractive and it is only after cutting, shaping and polishing does it become of interest to the general public and gem collectors.

Rock Currier
Crystals not pistols.

Thank you rock Currier