Description
Detailed Description
This is such a great combination piece, with tennantite crystals perched on each other up to the top, and a large bright pyrite crystal. The intergrowth of the tennantite and pyrite is super. The tennantite crystals are very sharp and three-dimensional. In very good condition, with a damaged crystal at the bottom left and a chip on a tennantite in the middle, which you don't see face-on, but you do see it if you are looking down on the piece. Lying flat or propped up on a higher display case shelf you don't notice, and it's superb for the price. Really nice.
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About these Tennantites
Mundo Nuevo has been best known for its hubnerite, quartz, fluorite and augelite. In recent years there have been occasional excellent finds of tennantite.
These tennantites, mined during 2014-15 specimen recovery work, are part of a find that has now been analyzed quite extensively. Of those (over 40 specimens tested) all were tennantite except one that was a borderline tennantite-tetrahedrite. Accordingly, specimens from this find are now labelled tennantite. I have not had each of these analyzed, given the pervasive tennantite results (and not wanting to add to their prices by incurring unnecessary cost). These tennantites were originally posted on this website labelled "tetrahedrite", as they were sold to me under that label – they were then removed from the site until the analysis work on the find had been completed.
They are excellent sharp crystals. After the crystals had formed, a late-stage fragmentation and recrystallization event seems to have occurred – the specimens have uneven naturally-fractured surfaces on the back/underside, and these surfaces are recrystallized.
