#look at my cool rocks

My niece (she is three) gave me these for Christmas!  She knows I like Cool Rocks and she wanted to get me some.  Her parents took her shopping and she picked them out herself.

A sparkly pyrite heart and a colorful piece of bismuth!  What excellent taste!  A truly superb addition to my collection!

Hey, wanna see a Cool Rock?

Here’s an interesting piece from my collection.  This awesome specimen is mordenite on stilbite!  The fluffy puffball-looking formations are mordenite, and the peach-colored crystals they’re growing on are stilbite.  They’re both part of the zeolite group of minerals.

The mordenite in this piece is especially cool!  Mordenite can form in all kinds of different crystal habits, like asbestos-like fibers or needle-like acicular sprays.  But these weird puffballs are my favorite form of mordenite.  They look soft and fluffy, like cotton balls or little puffball mushrooms.  But these formations are actually more like spikeballs.  They’re hard, solid rock! 

Poke poke… nope, not fluffy at all.  It feels completely solid and has a rough, spiky texture.  Can you believe a rock could just form in nature that way?  What a cool and unusual rock!