Trilobite, I love that word and the critter.

I was playing D&D and had a brief moment of sad when I asked if I could have a Trilobite for a Famaliar..

The GM said No and he did not know what a Trilobite was.. which made me sad.

I want to meet someone who has a trilobite as their Power Animal (familiar works too .

Hey, that's an impressive Trilobite fossil. I also recognize a chunk of Ulexite or "TV Stone." Quite a haul.

Which one is that? The optical calcite is fun and the quartz, with and without the little gold filliments are nice. The lower center bit is a partial nautiloid, all in pytire, with remarkable tiny details. The one real mystery bit is the yellow mineral, vividly bright yellow, and florensces blueish in UV.

My mistake. I thought the big, square crystal in the middle, right hand side was the "TV Stone" or Ulexite. I'm guessing the white stone with the yellowish powder on it could be Calcite? I'll do more "Research." It also looks like you got a few nice garnets, or semi-precious stones.

That was the optical calcite. The mineral with the yellow, actually very glassy, is still unknown. There are also a couple of nice cubic pyrites and a bit of bismuth (such fun crystals)

I had no idea Trilobites were that large! Most of the ones I've seen were about an inch. Nice haul. I was in Tucson during the show, but went to the Pima air museum.

That trilobite is freaking huge and beautifully chipped out. I grew up near 'Trilobite Mountain' in upstate New York and the biggest I've seen from there are only a few inches long.

That was only a modest size specimen, there were individuals twice that size. There were also the Moroccan exotics, with the spines and fiddly-bits. And, disappoinetedly, a lot of replicas, being sold as originals.

The blue crystals are Amethyst.

They might be dyed? There was a lot of faked and fudged material at the show. Copies of fossils, cast steel meteorites, possibly dyed colors on some stuff. You had to really know your stuff at times.

Heeey you found youre pets and play things when you where a kid I also remember those days !

Hard to dye the crystals without it leaching into the surrounding rock.

Damn neat stuff!

Very nice collection, looks like you have a piece of crystallized Sulfur there, though I'd have to actually see it in detail to say anything. Otherwise a nice little collection, though I'd hope that frosted Quartz didn't cost ya too much. (Also wonderful to see someone else who goes to the Tucson show!)

The yellow stuff is fairly hard and glassy, not sulfur. "Frosted quartz"?

Oh, Frosted Quartz is quartz that has impurities in it enough to make it look cloudy or "frosted." Father was a rock hound so I got to go out all the time down in the Huachucas to pick up small points and clusters...And maybe a few flakes of gold from a GPAA claim or two.

...Which I may be mistaking for the white linen you have under the stones.

I see Iceland spar, some magnesite and a fragment of ammonite!

Not sure if the purple stone is amethyst, though, the crystal formations are a bit odd...

Yeah, ammonite. It's all in pyrite. The dealer had all kinds of them, from Russia. There were TONS of mineralized ammonites, usually sectioned or polished up as pretties rather than paelo specimens.

so my first impression of tucson was right... "its just abunch of rocks"

Trilobyte! The other white meat...

Those look like the roaches in my home. :)

Curious, what do you do with them? Put them in a storage box, or do you have a display?

The big one will hang on the wall, the little ones go on my display table.

From what I have seen in the past, you have a lot to display. Do you exchange stuff after a while, trade for different stuff, or just have boxes of stuff all over the place? :)
How do keep from being buried by stuff you want to display and also have a functional space? I haven't learned that yet and am buried in boxes.

I'm not an avid collector, as this batch about doubles what I've got. Additional stuff includes some mass quartz, a bit of crynoid aggrigate, .5Gy wripples and cracked dried mud in fine grain sediments, and a couple mystery pretty rocks.

Rock on, sir.

Around our part of Tasmania we get a lot of Permian fossils, mostly shell impressions. There's a really good fossil bed about half an hour from where I live - but we don't take samples from there. There *are* other places where they're just *everywhere*: our prize is a rock a little bit smaller than a football, which is just one great mass of shells. My son found it when we were hiking, once. It weighs quite a few kilos, and we had 12 kilometres to walk, so I said we'd have to leave it. But then I had second thoughts - what was a couple of hours lugging a mass of rock, compared to having it in our collection forever? - so I snuck it into my backpack. When we got back to the car, ta-da!

It now sits in pride of place on our mantlepiece

I used to have a few fragments of diprotodon fossil (a wombat about the size of a hippo) from a dig i took part in when I was about 13; but, being a typical feckless teenager, I misplaced them long ago.

That's a pretty nice haul! The son of a friend of mine deals in a lot of minerals and fossils. He always has trilobites, ammonites and some other interesting fossils, most of them small (3"). I've bought some polished magnetic hematite from him (makes a neat stack on my desk). He does usually have a supply of Lingam stones of various sizes and nice patterns.

Didnt know you were going to be here. Woulda showed you the cool history stuff here.