This old label and specimen came to light the other day when we were moving some boxes around in the TVM store room.

Mineralhaus Droop was based in Dresden and this label has an uncertain age but likely to date from later in the period of 1905 -1930s.

The other interest in the specimen is the name Comptonit(e), this is a disused or old name for thomsonite-Ca, and Kaaden is the old locality name for Kadaň in Bohemia.

Nearly 3 years ago now, we checked out and invested in "spin" technology for capturing 360 degree presentation of minerals.

The concept is simple, you set your mineral centre on a turntable and then control the movement of the turntable with your camera to capture a series of stills as the turntable steps round.

From the series of stills you then create a presentation that runs through the stills in sequence to simulate movement.

The issue for this presentation is the cost of time in producing and storing 36 or more images especially for a single product.

When starting offering analytical service I got in contact with some passionate mineral collectors.
This allowed me too examine some minerals, I did not hold in my hands before.

A few days ago an anonymous user from Germany made e-Rocks history by being the 10,000th registered user to sign up to our site.

As ever, we would like to thank "anonymous" and all our growing ranks of visitors both old and new for checking in and making e-Rocks such a great place to work.

We also have to thank all our 90 odd Sellers from around the globe for the constant supply of diverse and interesting minerals on view here and our outreaching sites.

Our man of action George (and partner Sam) have had a busy few months getting themselves organised for a house move.

Today finally it is the big day and everything is set to move into the new place.

Of course we are all happy; with new house comes a better office and facilities for managing e-Rocks and TVM!

Looking forward to seeing it all set up, and champagne corks popped!!

Calamaite is the third natural Ti dominant sulfate mineral known yet. Russian scientists recognized this phase, occuring as filigrane colourless sprays, while doing some analytical investigations in a matrix of coquimbite / römerite. Type locality is the Alcaparrosa mine in Chile.

A recently performed EDS analysis of such sprays showed, that this is a very rare phase among pickeringite, which looks very similar.

Only a fraction of the candidates were calamaite finally.

One specimen, the only I have, is now in my auction running till Tuesday.

This weekend three of my friends visited me for some analytical work on their self collected and collection material.

One of them had an old Tsumeb sample hosting filigrane silky masses on germanite renierite matrix. Not very beautiful, but obviously interesting stuff.

EDS analysis gave a single gallium peak. As söhngeite does not fit the habit, we concluded tsumgallite.

Raman analysis should be done later, to collect a spectrum of tsumgallite.

If you should ever consider to analyse material from your findings you can contact me via [email protected].

Greenockite from Tsumeb forms beautiful hexagonal orange crystals in cavities of Cd rich galena. Often the specimens host brownish Cd rich smithsonite. Crystal size is usually around 50-100µm.

Studies under the electron beam reveal the details of the crystal surface. The pointy crystal tip sometimes look like if there was a small hole. A detail of the crystal tip is shown below. Collected backscattered electrons (small surface details are lost) and the SE electrons (small details of surface preserved) form these images.

There has been a sensational recent find of fluorite in Connemara, County Galway, in the Republic of Ireland.

TVM has been given exclusive access to the locality and has been given first refusal to the material released by the owners.

Back in February 2003 Pezzottaite was big news at Tucson show. At the time it was a hot new discovery, still an unnamed mineral and the sort of new thing Tucson show thrives on.

These were originally brought to Tucson by Madagascan mineral specialist, Laurent Thomas and sold as Béryl Framboise or Cesium Beryl after early investigation by the Liege Mineral Club has established some of the chemistry.

Even at the time, ie before the Internet of today, news traveled fast.

Our technical department at e-Rocks (AKA my wife and George) have been on at me for some time to get a decent mobile phone as I am usually hard to track down when offline.

Coupled with this we have a mobile version of the cataloguing/inventory system which of course needs a compatible phone to drive it.

So now my life has changed, with a new mobile and better access to all those interesting things all the time I am even busier than before!

Burn's Night comes along every year and is mostly a Scottish based celebration of the poet Robbie Burns, so I try to get some "haggis neeps and tatties" in my diet during this time.

It also serves to remind us that another e-Rocks anniversary is coming up; and this year it is our 11th Birthday!

Our first auction started with 30 items on 26 January 2006 and completed three days later on 29 January. As I remember it was quite a frantic time but we got through it and by the time auction 2 came along we had most things tied down.

Last week I took a few days out to visit some favourite old haunts up in Weardale.

I have always loved the place and the mining and mineral heritage have created an enduring strange feeling of home from home when ever I visit.

The central purpose of my trip was a visit to the Boltsburn Mine. Since it became news that access to the "Holy Grail" of all Weardale mines had been rediscovered I have been following the story with great interest.

Was happy to see a nice post from Marc Allen Fleischer of the Fleischer Museum on Facebook the other day.

Mark had recently purchased and received the above Megiliggar apatite from TVM.

This wulfenite specimen was news at Ste Marie Show in 2005, it was part of small find brought to the show by Guangha (George) Liu.

The locality was given as Mian Ning Mine in Sichuan, China. At the time there was a lot of discussion, but the find was short lived.

The specimen featured was quite large and rich, not the best and landed in my collection, packed away for a number of years it emerged recently chez TVM.

It was in August last year that we reported the our page on Facebook had reached 8,000 likes, well now we have risen to the 10,000 mark.

We continue to use our page to provide our Facebook followers a daily snapshot of the e-Rocks site new listings, auctions closing and so on.

Our gallery of daily mineral photo selections now stands at over 8,300 images representing our seller contributions over 3+ years. If you visit the page please check out our Mineral Photos section.

When I started examining micro minerals I came across a nice specimen hosting olive green bartelkeite. It was pure luck to find this mineral. This is what I can say now looking back at the small number of specimens I had.

This makes the species to one of the rarest member of the germanium containing minerals, even compared to the also rare schaurteite or otjisumeite.

I am happy to offer one again now after years in my upcoming auction.

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Saturday morning, September 2014, we were up bright and early and on the road to Fernleigh, Ontario. Unless you are a mineral collector, you likely will not have heard of the it.

We were looking for a kyanite and staurolite occurrence. Actually, I was dreading it. The weather was spectacular – clear blue skies and warm for the season.

“What’s to dread? “you ask. The rock outcrop in question is out in the open, under the hot blazing sun. I do not tolerate heat very well. Especially the high noon kind.

Abstract

Since we launched the new e-Rocks in September 2015 we have been busy behind the scenes working on small revisions and tweaks, plus of course doing all the other work in running the show.

Today we have just upgraded the site to unleash a whole lot of new features, mostly to do with searching and finding things in the mass of data we have accumulated in nearly 11 years of operation.

The most obvious change you will see is the expanded range of search icons at the top of each page.

This week we are planning to make some upgrades to e-Rocks.

Everything will be going on behind the scenes.

There maybe a few occasions you will find a page to slow to load or will need a "refresh" for this to complete as the new software synchronises with your browser etc.

By Thursday we plan to have completed the upgrade and you will have lots of new features to try out.

Drop us a line if you are having any problems!

Not really a new year's resolution as such, but to make space for new projects, it is time to sell my old collection/hoard of Romanian minerals.

Back in the day, before 2002 I put together quite a large selection of Romanian pieces, traveling there when the mines were open and of course picking things up at Ste Marie and Munich shows.

We thought they would never disappear!!

I have around 80 flats which were packed up when I moved to TV Towers in 2005 still largely untouched since.

Wishing all our visitors, sellers and buyers a very Happy New Year and great things from 2017.

Thinking things over this morning I had a sobering thought; there are now 357 days left before Christmas 2017 and the next planned "dark day" with no auctions.

That it is a lot of days to fill with new minerals!

On the other hand one can only guess as to what interesting and unusual things will happen along this year - really what makes our little world such fun.

This discovery in the Ted Smithson Collection and a previous entry by Mike Brooke led me to look into the background of these microscopic grains of gold from Sutherland in Scotland.

The sheer amount of time - 24 hours - required to pan 100 or so flakes of gold, or as Mike's item suggests 1cwt (50+Kg) of silt suggests wonderful dedication and concentration!

The story goes that gold was first prospected back in 1868 by a Roberl Gilchrist a native of nearby Kildoan after his return from gold prospecting in Australia; having gained permission from the Duke of Sutherland.

In the office this morning I worked out some interesting e-Rocks facts for the last year.

In 2016 we have run 1555 auctions with 59,373 listings added to the site. We have sold 49,161 items.

Also in 2016 we have served 629,183 visitors with 6.45M pages of data.

On Average there has been 11 people looking at e-Rocks during every minute of 2016, turning a page every 4.88 seconds.

The searchable mineral database now stands at over 290K entries with around 1.25M associated photos.

2016 has been busy and great fun!

This leiteite specimen from the Uerpmann collection recently posted on Facebook brought back fond memories of the man who's name was given to the mineral back in 1977.

Leiteite was named to honour Luis Antonio Bravo Teixeira-Leite (1942–1999), Portuguese-South African amateur mineralogist of Pretoria, South Africa, who noted the first specimen during the heyday of Tsumeb production.

When he saw my picture, Facebook friend David Minster from Gauteng, South Africa expressed these fond words about Leite.

Above is a picture from a few days ago of our last pallet of minerals to arrive for 2016.

What a busy year it has been and now it is nearly over. Christmas and the holiday period are all set and there are some terrific contributions this year our sellers. Please check out the auction and seller pages to see what is what.

The e-Rocks office will be taking a few days off here and there, but of course the auction schedule and support will continue throughout the holidays. Please email/message us if you need any help.

I found this petrified “hamburger” among the landscaping cobbles at my old house. It is a water-worn limestone rock that has a layer of fossilized creatures. We keep it on display in a McDonald’s container and bring it out for show and tell regularly.

At first, when I’d show it to my family and friends, I’d say, “Would you like fries with that?” Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to follow through if they said, “Yes, please!”

Well, I’m happy to report that we now offer petrified fries with our (two-and-a-) quarter pounder!

Ever had a discussion along the lines of "I have this old specimen, but it has no labels so I am not sure of where or what it is?"

Most of us have and the mystery sometimes never gets solved, we have quite a pile here, which sometimes has a happy ending when a match or research turns up an answer.

Here is a good example of never trusting old labels 100%, even if they are genuinely attached to the specimen.

This fine Swiss fluorite and stellerite has a long label heritage with matching collection numbers stating it is from Binntal.

George and I are back from our Christmas road trip into Germany via Belgium and France.

What we didn't pick up in minerals we certainly made up for with adventure and festive fun.

Normal service with email replies etc will return from today, after a bit of catching up.