One of the fun things about running a rock and mineral business is shopping on ebay and the internet for interesting sources of materials. We offer some fossils as well, and I found a batch on ebay and ordered them. They came in and they were so cool. It’s neat in the first place to get a little box from the Polish Post and see the neat stamps from there.
And then the fossils were beautiful! Little plant nodules they are called… little roundish stones that when you crack them in half, they have a perfect little imprint of a leave or pine cone or some other ancient plant material from thousands of years ago.
They are….
Lepidodendron cone, Neuropteris sp. Lyginodendron sp. Calamite sp. Annullaria sp. (the species involved) and are from Poland, Upper Silesia, Carboniferous, Westphalian time period.
Fancy talk for being pretty darn old.
And now being sold on eBay and collected by kids all over the world.
Pretty cool if you ask me.
We get a lot of American Mason Creek fossil plant nodules from Illinois, and those are beautiful as well. However, this was kind of fun to get a little special box of treasures from half a world away. Well, 1/3 of a world away.
And we got some beautiful Baltic amber too!
Polished amber is a little prettier, but this stuff is still neat to look at and hold. I just love the color. I’d like my living room walls to be this color! They are close, but it’s hard to mimic the honey gold glow of amber.
Here’s a pretty neat one, it’s actually a little pine coneish seed pod thing and you can actually see some of the veins in the leaves and all, just amazing.
Neat stuff, ya know?
One of the funny parts though, of the package, is that they packed them all in Polish toliet paper. And let me tell you folks… stuff over there is pretty, well, let’s just say… ROUGH and old fashioned! It was like well, unbleached recycled stuff… we’ve got it good over here you know…
