FMF - Friends of Minerals Forum, discussion and message board

[William Size]

In June I went to a liquidation auction of a natural history museum in Georgia (USA). My eyes were bigger than my car, but I went ahead and bought the galena specimen shown below. It is from the Viburnum Trend, Missouri (probably the Buick Mine). It has hundreds of galena cubo-octahedrons with the larger crystals showing Spinel Twin law. It weighs about 400 pounds. I cleaned it up and now I do not know what to do with it! Any ideas?

[Peter Megaw]

Being facetious....you can give it to me...I'll even pay the shipping.

More reasonably, if you really are at a loss to know what to do with it, you could donate it to the Tellus Museum...they have a very nice and growing collection.

[alfredo]

I was going to suggest Tellus too! Nice folk there, competent curators, and it will be well taken care of; and you can take a tax write-off, and have visitation rights. It's really too big for most private collections.

[Peter Megaw]

There also exists the possibility of getting it to a trimmer who could make several flats of cabinet and minatures out of this.

But I would still go with donation if your porch isn't big enough

[Pete Modreski]

I'm guessing that it was probably the Tellus Museum that William bought it from in the first place (how many other Nat. History museums are there in Georgia?). But perhaps in its cleaned-up state, they'd want it back--or any other museum that would like something really big; looks like a great specimen.

Pete

[Matt_Zukowski]

How did you clean it up?

[William Size]

The galena specimen did not come from the Tellus Museum. They have seen it and were interested in it.Thanks for the advise. The specimen was not on display at the museum where the auction was held. It was in a storage room along with other equally huge and dirty specimens, including a specimen of angle-plated quartz (see photo) now at the Tellus Museum. I just used some soap and water on the galena to clean it up. Beneath the galena is a thin layer of sphalerite. The host rock is a dolomitized limestone.