Undark article on Opal Fossils and the Museum centre in Australia

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SwordfishMining
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Undark article on Opal Fossils and the Museum centre in Australia

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Cloaked in white dust and surrounded by expansive plains, the town of Lightning Ridge produces the bulk of the world’s precious black opal. This rare gemstone, prized for its dazzling play of color, hides out of sight in the Australian outback beneath a town roughly 450 miles northwest of Sydney. And for more than 100 years, people have come to the Ridge to find their fortune chasing precious opal.

As valuable as the fossils might be to science, miners are usually the first to lay eyes on them, and this presents a conundrum.

As it turns out, these miners have been uncovering not just opal, but opalized fossils: Bones, teeth, shells, and plant material turned to opal, embedded in the ancient claystone and preserved, like the gemstones, for 100 million years under a thin veneer of sediment. Some of the opalized fossils unearthed at Lightning Ridge represent animal species found nowhere else, and they are packed with information from the Cretaceous Period — the tail end of the age of the dinosaurs. The prehistoric remains — some smaller than a fingernail — can be found edging out of mine face, or in the piles of discarded opal-bearing dirt, churned out by miners by the truckload.

“If it were not for the opal miners — many of whom have sharp eyes and regard the fossils with as great a sense of awe as paleontologists do — we would not have, or know anything about, these fossils,” says paleontologist, gemologist, and long-term resident of the Ridge, Jenni Brammall. As valuable as the fossils might be to science, miners are usually the first to lay eyes on them, and this presents a conundrum: Opal miners hold the mineral rights to whatever opal they find in their registered mineral claim, and that includes opalized fossils. When money gets tight — and it often does — a miner might destroy an opalized fossil in the hope of extracting saleable precious opal, or sell the fossil overseas where it can fetch a hefty sum. Sometimes they keep the fossils they find for their sentimental value, leaving them tucked away in private collections. (continued) You need to go there for the Pics.
https://undark.org/article/chasing-opal-fossils-australian-outback/
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PinkDiamond
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Re: Undark article on Opal Fossils and the Museum centre in Australia

Post by PinkDiamond »

Good article, John, thanks so much for sharing it with us. :)
PinkDiamond
ISG Registered Gemologist


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