Next week we’ll be reviewing our mineral collections at the Horniman, which means that I’ve been trying to track down the various minerals in the collection. Amongst them I found this rather lovely sample of bismuth – a non-toxic, silvery, heavy metal that can naturally grow into an intricate step-structure crystal.
As the outer surface of the bismuth crystal oxidises it becomes iridescent, creating a beautiful and multifaceted structure that is really quite gorgeous. Hope you like it!
Crumbs – rather inundated with comments about last Friday’s mystery object! Apologies for not answering all of the questions, the sudden leap in comments coincided with a particularly hectic day where I had virtually no computer access. The comments were wide ranging, from cannonballs to turtle eggs, truffles to coprolites (fossil dung), burnt cooking/toys to a bezoar. One of my favourites was the fossilised fist of a wood elf – and I can sort of see the similarity:
However, I am almost sad to say that it is none of the above. There were a few answers that came close, Don C suggested a concretion, Solius suggested mineral crystals, SmallCasserole identified that it was mineralised with a radial pattern, but one person had this hammered – Jeremy was spot on with with an identification of Continue reading
Zygoma 