Dreyerite

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Dreyerite
BiVO4, Tetragonal



The very rare Bi vanadate Dreyerite was discovered in the year 1978 by Dr. Gerhard Dreyer, a german mineralogist who was an assistant professor at the Mainz university. The mineral occurred in clefts of a silicified fossil wood of permian age which was found during geological mapping works by Dr. J. Haneke southeast of the village of Hirschhorn in Rhineland-Palatinate. Besides other minerals Dreyer noticed "straw-yellow, dirty-yellow to brownish-yellow" crystals which were initially identified as 'Bismite'.

But first analyses revealed their composition to be BiVO4 and the crystal system to be tetragonal - and that this mineral hadn´t been found in nature until then. Together with E. Tillmanns Dreyer carried out chemical, mineralogical and crystallographical tests for an exact description and submitted the results to the IMA for approval as a new mineral. He suggested the name to be 'Bisvanite'.

Before approval by the IMA Gerhard Dreyer died in a tragic car accident during a scientific field trip. In consequence the name of the new mineral was changed to 'Dreyerite' to honour one of the most profound connoisseurs of Palatinan mineralogy, geology and mining history.

Dreyerite is only known from a very few places worldwide. The probably best specimens - although also micro crystals as had been found at the type locality - have been described from the Clara mine at Oberwolfach, Black Forest, Germany. Last but not least in 2009 Dreyerite has been described from the Schneeberg, Erzgebirge area.

References:
Belendorff, K. (2009): Dreyerit und Rhabdophan-(Nd) aus Schneeberg, Erzgebirge. Mineralien-Welt 20 (3), 27-29. (in German)
Dreyer, G.; Tillmanns, E. (1981): Dreyerite: natural, tetragonal bismuth vanadate from Hirschhorn/Pfalz. Neues Jahrbuch für Mineralogie, Monatshefte 1981, 151-154. (in German).
Kolitsch, U., J. Gröbner, G. Blaß, H.-W. Graf und A. Pring (2005): Neufunde aus der Grube Clara im mittleren Schwarzwald (II): Dreyerit, Gasparit-(Ce), Klinobisvanit, Kobaltkoritnigit, Metatyuyamunit, Roscoelith, Sengierit, Vésigniéit und Wakefieldit. Lapis 30 (9), 35-39; 58. (in German)
unpublished reports and photographs from the archive of the Pfälzisches Bergbaumuseum Imsbach e.V.


Germany
Rhineland-Palatinate, Katzweiler, Hirschhorn



The material from the type locality at Hirschhorn is scarce and only a few samples are kept in Mainz and in the USA. The Dreyerite occurred there as small yellowish tabular crystals or radial crystal aggregates together with native Silver, Baryte, Uraninite and other secondary arsenates and vanadates in clefts and fissures of silicified Dadoxylon sp.



Germany
Baden-Württemberg, Oberwolfach, Clara Mine



In June 2004 Dreyerite was found for the first time at the Clara Mine. It occurred in dissolution vugs in Fluorite (a dark purple "Stinkspat" or Antozonite). The small straw yellow crystals were all in the sub mm size range and were accompanied by Limonite, Baryte and Quartz. Although being small the find was considered to have yielded the best crystals of the species so far.

Ref.: Kolitsch et al. (2005), LAPIS 30, 9, p. 35-39




Germany
Saxony, Schneeberg District, Güldener Falk Mine

We need someone to tell us about the dreyerite from this locality and infos/history about & pictures.


More references can be found at the mindat-page for Dreyerite.



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Edited 15 time(s). Last edit at 02/07/2011 09:15PM by Roger Lang.

Hi Roger,

I like the extra information about the type material - however I am wondering if it is better that this information goes on the page for dreyerite rather than here? What do you, and others, think? I'm not 100% against it, I just wonder if it fits in with the style of the rest of the site.

Also... can you upload the photos directly to mindat - once the final "best minerals" system is in place external image links won't work (we don't like external images because we can't control whether they will still work in 10 years time).

Jolyon

Roger,
Probably the picture of the spectra and the picture of Gerhard Dreyer should not be directly in the article, but might be better linked to it so that is a user wanted to access them, all the would have to do would be to click a linked word or phrase like we do with the locality images.. An interesting arrangement and certainly demonstrates how flexible our articles can be if we need them to be. A good effort. Now hurry up and do 500 more, but remember don't spend more than 60 hours a week on this project!

Rock Currier
Crystals not pistols.

Hi Jol and Rock,
thanks for the comments. Jol, i did not upload some of the pictures until now as i first wanted to know your opinion on this format. Also, where to put the pictures of Dreyer and the spectrum - which category? Under the locality (as additional info) or under Dreyerite? What would you think?

I will follow Rocks suggestion and put the spectrum and Dreyer picture only as a word link in the text later. I am open for any discussion of course and await your input.

Cheers
Roger

Dreyer - other - personal
Spectrum - other - miscellaneous

@David .. done, thx, .. BTW if you want to put some of the infos to the dreyerite page please go ahead

@all .. please have a look, i restructured according to your suggestions,

cheers
Roger



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/17/2009 07:34PM by Roger Lang.

Added Clara mine info on Dreyerite- now only the Güldener Falk Mine, Schneeberg occurrence is missing .. anyone infos or pictures? And if someone my have a scan of the mentioned Belendorff, K. (2009) article in Mineralienwelt ....
If thats done the best of dreyerite article would be complete.

Cheers
Roger

Roger, You will need to clean up the formatting a bit to bring it in line with that of the other articles on Mindat. Do you have any information about how bit the crystals got and how many specimens were collected, perhaps a note on where the best specimen (s) are?

Rock Currier
Crystals not pistols.

Rock,
i reformatted some, and cleaned up a bit .. better? .. but we still need the saxony info.

Cheers
Roger

Roger,
Yes, its better. But the locality strings need to be reversed so that the mine name is last. Looks good.
Rock

Rock Currier
Crystals not pistols.

Rock Currier Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
But the locality strings need to
> be reversed so that the mine name is last.

Rock,
sry but this is nonsense to me .... if i look up a loc or specimen, i always try the mine name etc first.

If you label a specimen, would you write:

Pyromorphite
Germany
Rhineland-Palatinate
Bad Ems district
Merkur Mine

?

NOPE you wouldnt .. nobody would

The opposite would apply ..

So i will certainly obey the set up rules for the project but i think that this has potential of discussion

cheers
Roger

Roger,
Yes, when you make up a label for your collection and I make up one for mine, we put the mine name first. Its is centuries of tradition. However when you put the localities in a long list and try and try to find a specific one in it, an alphabetical list of the mine names is great as long as you remember the exact mine name. However if you don't, however the reverse locality order makes finding the locality much easier. Suppose you are looking for a mine in Pennsylvania, but you don't remember the exact name of the mine. Go to your photos on your home page and see if you can find the mines in Pennsylvania by using the alphabetical mines listing. Also many localities don't have specific mine names but rather ones like Freiberg, or Saxony, or Keweenaw Peninsula, or Tri State District or Green River or Satnley buttes or Namibia etc.Then the alphabetical by mine name sees pretty awkward.

Or if you have say about 5000 micros all in boxes arranged alphabetically by species. Now try and find those from a particular mine. You will find that the best way to make the labels for those specimens will be the country first, the county or secondary political subdivision second and so on down to the mine name last. The first name you see on the label is the country and you can place all those calcites from the USA together, and then all those from a particular state and so on down to the mine name. Here is another case where alphabetical listing by Country, State, County etc. is very practical.

Or, upload a picture without first finding a locality for it and try and find it using the locality search tool provided on the photo upload page by typing in the mine name, assuming you remember the exact spelling of it..

Or best of all, and I would encourage you to try this: Search for Calcite/Germany and see how easy it is to find a specific mine name. If at some future time these localities could be flagged perhaps in red with the number of images in our database associated with the locality. I think it would make it much easier to find most localities we are looking for. I suspect that probably 90% of the localities in the Mindat database do not have associated images in our image gallery.

With the exception of my box top labels for my micros where I use reverse locality order I make my labels with the traditional locality string order, but over the years have come to realize that this is because of tradition, and not because of any practical virtue. Ill be glad to discuss this further with you, but I have though long and hard about this particular problem, though perhaps you can suggest a better more practical way.

Eventually, we hope that Best minerals will find its way into a database system with flexible search algorithms and this will allow us quick access to what we are looking for regardless of what default locality ordering we use. With the locality strings in reverse order it should make data entry easier. Also algorithms can be developed to reverse the locality order, and perhaps some day if Best Minerals stays in its present form, we can present the user with the option of which locality order he would prefer to see.

When you need to insert new images from a new locality into the Best Minerals articles, you will find that it is easier to find the insertion place with the locality strings in reverse order as we have them now.






To

Rock Currier
Crystals not pistols.

Hello,

Appreciate a lot the information available here on this site. I found it on google searching for "Dreyerite". I am in fact the nephew of Dr. Gerhard Dreyer. I am not a mineralogist, but a chemist with a bit of mineralogy as a hobby of mine. I recognize the handwritten notice of my uncle. Thanks for putting this information together!

Best regards,
Martin

Hi Rock,
you convinced me ;) .. i fear that i will have to reverse the strings also with my other best of articles :(
Unfortunately i forgot to tick the follow topic box so i did not see your response earlier .. just as martin posted i noticed the reply.
so done...

Hey Martin,
nice you stopped by. I have all this info from my colleague Dr. Haneke who knew your uncle and did geological mapping with him. I found the story of the Dreyerite discovery very interesting, we keep all the original documentary material that Jost Haneke kept at the Pfälzisches Bergbaumuseum. If you want to know more please leave me a PM. We presented all this info in a poster display at the museum some years ago. Glad you like it!

Cheers
Roger

@Roger

To learn more about the Schneeberg occurrence, you should send a PM to Steffen Michalski. If anyone can help you, it is probably him.