Does anyone know what type of stone this is?

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It is a very neat stone bequeathed by a family member.
I had no idea until I took the close up pictures that the stone was anything but black in color.

To the eye the stone appears deep jet black. It has a smooth, glossy and almost oily texture, but the camera lens picked up colors I had no idea were there.
The stone is not polished.

I have looked around online to try and identify it from pictures but I have not found anything that looked close enough for me to call it.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/129512637@N07/

Four pictures there, flickr has a nice zoom feature that lets you look close up if you click a pic and let it load the slideshow.

If anyone has any guesses? Smile

Sozo

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Type: Question • Score: 5 • Views: 1,666 • Replies: 10

[+3] - farmerman - 12/28/2014could be a hematite or limonite or goethite pebble. Get a piece of ceramic tile and scratch the mineral on the unglazed side. If it gives a reddish brown "Streak" its hematite or...

@Sozo,

Soz I'd guess the black one to be a volcanic glass of some sort

Other's intriguing, awaiting further postings

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Hi thanks for the reply, I posted on another geology board as well and on the say of a couple other people I had been settling on Hematite after seeing the hematite jewelry on the page below.

https://crystal-cure.com/ejb-ring-hematite.html

It looks the same to my untrained eye Smile

As for the second one, it is a really cool rock, almost perfectly round and it glints when rotated under a light.
Someone once said it might even be a geode. I would love to cut it and see what is inside.

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@Sozo,

Yea /Sozo that black'n does sound like pretty good guess

I wish you could cut the other one too; tho "geode" is a pretty loose term

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@dalehileman,

could be a hematite or limonite or goethite pebble.
Get a piece of ceramic tile and scratch the mineral on the unglazed side. If it gives a reddish brown "Streak" its hematite or limonite

The first three look more like igneous rocks like diorites , granite , diabase or any one of a family of rocks with excess silica

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@Sozo,

Sozo wrote:

To the eye the stone appears deep jet black.

Might it be jet?

http://davesrockshop.com/oldsite/images/jet.jpg

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@izzythepush,

most of the jet comes from UK (a small amt of Pa ANTHRACITE could be considered jet but not quite)

Ive never seen a sample of real jet , I understand its quite light in heft but breaks with a conchoidal fracture and you can still pick out the fossilized grain of the ancient wood. Is that so?

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@farmerman,

Only seen it in shop windows as souvenirs when I went to Whitby as a kid.

http://www.beautifulbritain.co.uk/images/Whitby/whitby059.jpg

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@izzythepush,

You know it does look remarkably similar to jet, it seems to me the closest I've seen. Between that and Hematite perhaps.

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@Sozo,

The sale of jet is strange, being black it's not the first choice for jewellery so you don't tend to see it. Unless you go to Whitby that is, and it's everywhere. Just Whitby mind you, at Scarborough, less than 20 miles away, you won't find a trace of it.

Sorry I can't be more helpful. Farmerman is the geological expert around here.

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@Sozo,

Of course you should hold a magnet up to the ock and see if there is any magnetism. Hematite displays a certain type magnetism below a specific temp called the Neel one (its unique to the iron oxy-hydroxids)

But the streak (color imparted on a scratch done of the back of a ceramic tile) is more areddish brown , whereas jet is listed as a "muddy" dark brown.

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Does anyone know what type of stone this is?

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