FMF - Friends of Minerals Forum, discussion and message board

[Jason]

As we all know quality almost always supercedes quantity when it comes to gems, rough, or minerals but they are certain occasions where size/quantity can have an impact. I picked this red beryl crystal up...has some good color but is intruded with rhyolite..what makes this one special is it's size..topping out at 46.00cts. All sides look the same in the pics above. Just 8 cts. shy of the largest ever found..now i can't be 100% positive but I would wager that this crystal has to be in the top 10 if not the top five largest ever found......I have never seen one larger and I have looked at and seen many large red beryl crystals. It retains a good red color and has a perfect hex shape and is double terminated...in a world where a red beryl crystal over 2cts. or 3cts. is considered large this sucker is a whopper. So in this instance when you know you must have one of the largest ever discovered in the wolrd I think quantity can rub shoulders with quality

[GneissWare]

I agree with you. Sometimes, having something out of the ordinary is good.

During a feeding frenzy for gemmy red beryls a few years ago, I found the attached "ugly duckling" languishing in the corner of a case. It was the biggest beryl I had seen. It has great color but NO transparency. But I bought it just because it was large. I also liked that it was still on matrix.

[Jason]

Very nice..about as aesthetic looking as you can get with that spec., gneiss..perched perfectly in the middle
amguy

[John S. White]

Wonderful crystal amethystguy but can you please provide the dimensions? Most of us crystal collectors do not describe our crystals by carat weight so it is hard to translate this into actual size. Having fingers in the image helps but we cannot tell if you are the size of Peter Megaw or only half that size.

[Granate]

The issue of the size and quality has been one of the concerns more recurring in my attitude of collector for over 40 years, and my view is that the greater the specimen the demand for quality should decrease. Yet i am amazed when i see a buyer exploring with the magnifying glass a copy of 20 centimetres. You cannot ask that a sequoya 100 meters in height does not have any broken branch which would be inadmissible in another departure from seed.

[Jason]

Sorry about that..i sell lots of rough so use weight more than size and sometimes i forget to add that in..it's 2.2cm long x 1.4cm wide

[Dean Allum]

amethystguy,
I usually go for quantity over perceived quality. The rocks that we typically deal with are unusual in nature. It is more unusual to have a large rock than a perfectly formed microscopic crystal.
In the Venn diagram of mineral specimens, if I can't have the intersection of quality and quantity, I will take the quantity lobe over the the quality lobe.
-Dean Allum

[Jason]

Okay..here is the deal..the "54cts largest "was taken from "utah geological survey..survey notes... 2002" saying largest ever found was 54cts. or 34mm x 14mm along with about 20 other online sites and a few very respectable ones..which i assume is where they got that info from..i was just shown an 84ct one(hex) and a 54.45ct one(hex) which had little to no rhyolite at all..almost pure red beryl ..so not really sure ..lol..so the UGS was wrong?..maybe these were found later than 2002 But the largest ever found according to UGS and all the other sites i guess is wrong or terribly outdated..