New Location – Brenda, Arizona

Well, things here have been a bit crazy lately, mostly due to publishing and writing matters.  But here’s one new location to keep you going – one that I will be loading onto the main gallery as soon as I have a moment.

Brendas are one of the more obscure ‘named geodes’.  You wont find that much info about them on the internet but they are recognised among the geode-cracking brigade.  However, when a bunch of them began to appear on ebay, it quickly became apparent that they are actually a type of thunderegg.  As is often the case with geodes, most were cracked open but there were a few cut specimens and one quickly made its way over to me.  It was recently polished, and here it is.  A rather curious thunderegg all round really, with a bizarre mix of materials and spaces where materials have weathered away in the core.  Many Brendas just have crystal cores, but when agate does appear it is a rather rough, opaque red and white, as here.  The black material is a bit of a mystery to me.  It’s extremely soft and could be a kind of decaying calcite, but I wouldn’t like to say for sure.

A second, larger and possibly more dramatic specimen is also on its way.  With tilt lines!  So watch this space.

 

New Location – Allen Canyon, Oregon

A beautiful new location for the gallery – the first Allen Canyon thunderegg I have ever seen.  This one contains some lovely tufts of yellow moss – and indeed, yellow seems to be a dominant colour in these since it pervades the matrix as well.

The massive gallery of Oregon thundereggs can be seen here.

New Location – Clanton Draw and some Quiet Cloud Agate

A new location from New mexico.  This is a location where the seemingly eternal New Mexico Browns are developing into the greyer spectrum!  This is a location that sometimes displays flowbanding - unfortunately not here.   The core is a nice growth of quiet cloud agate surrounding a muddled druzy cave.

New Mexico Gallery.

New Location – Hartkoppe (Sailauf) – Tiny Red and White Crumb!

I have long been flirting around the two locations at Sailauf (the other being Rehberg, which I have yet to find).  They do occasionally crop up for sale, so they are not the rarest thunderegg under the sun.  But they are a location that always annoyed me!  They are so prone to being incomplete, muddled, broken – smears of red in a shattered white wreckage – that I just couldn’t!  Irregular I like – but incomplete just drives me crazy.  Call it an obsession!  In the end though, I finally found a specimen that I like, and in a somewhat unexpected way, because if I hadn’t published the Michigan Keweenaw stone a month or so ago, this would be the smallest thunderegg I have ever seen.  It is only 2.6cm across – a tiny red and white crumb.  Even so, it has a very nice thunderegg structure that puts most of the larger specimens I have seen to shame.  So here is another new location for Germany!

Other half can be seen on the gallery: http://www.thundereggs.co.uk/germany/index_hartkoppe.html

 

The Joy of Ocos

They may be one of the most common of all the geodes, almost ubiquitous in any number of rock shops, trinket stalls, museum gift shops etc. – but that shouldn’t blind us to what amazing things they are. Their delicacy and patterning is unique, washed through with gorgeous feathery ‘cloud agate’. This plus the complex crystal caves filled with everything from Amethyst to Goethite and beyond make them possibly one of the most remarkable agates in the world when at their best – and I don’t say that lightly.

For all their ubiquity, it is surprisingly hard to find information about these, maybe partly since nobody can agree on the exact name. I have seen Oco, Coco, Ocho, Ocos etc. Oco is the name given on the Mindat website, so I will go with that one for now. However, I only recently became aware of the fact that there is possibly more than one Brazilian location involved. The classic Oco comes from Três Pinheiros, Fountoura Xavier, Rio Grande do Sul. These stones are dug out of the red-brown earth of the region and form a welcome extra ‘crop’ for the farmers. The following though, is almost certainly a Parana Cloud Agate – Similar but subtly different:

Like a lot of the stones out of Brazil, there is a certain vagueness about their origin – and I can’t pretend to know much at all.  But I am totally blown away by the delicate patterns and sheer intricacy of these stones.  I have now launched a gallery of them in the ‘non-thundereggs’ section of the website.

Another Motherload, Barely More than a Month Later – Introducing Eggzilla!!

Well – what can I say?  This is an Eggzilla thunderegg.  Eggzillas are a massive and colourful type of thunderegg from a private mine in Luna County, New Mexico.  This one is a whopping 22cm across.  Ummmm – often with agate, often with crystal caves, often (but not always) with flowbanding . . . sometimes even as wild as this . . .

Ummm – ok, i posted it, now please excuse me while I go and just stare at it for a few more hours . . .

I am dedicating this one to Poppet!!  :-)

A Brief Digression from Thundereggs – A Polished Keokuk Geode

I occasionally let my hair down and publish something that isn’t a thunderegg.  This section of the gallery is basically ‘just for fun’ – nothing more than a few different things that caught my usually thunderegg-fixated eyes at some point.  In this case, here is a specimen of one of the most famous geodes in the world – the Keokuk Geodes from Iowa, USA.  These are fairly often seen, but the majority are cracked open rather than polished.  I am personally not a fan of broken rocks, and I think in this case that is born out by the wonderful subtle colours and transparency that are revealed when they are actually cut and polished.  This specimen has a relatively unusual fine band of what I take to be white agate framing the almost solid quartz core (anyone like to correct me?).  It’s not a thunderegg, but it is really lovely I think!

Click here for the small non-thunderegg section of the gallery: http://www.thundereggs.co.uk/nonthundereggs/index.html