Welcome to the 'The List' - your place, where you can contribute information and photos of your own extraordinary mineral specimen(s) to a growing list of generally 'not so giant' crystals, which are however the largest crystals of their kind. Please make yourself a home and read on... ***

 

Speaking about a compilation of extraordinarily large crystals in his 1981 publication "The Largest Crystals" Peter C. Rickwood* absolutely correctly noted :

'How best to present this data has been a problem for a list including every mineral species,
such as Palache (1923) commenced to compile, would have been both cumbersome and
extremely difficult to produce.'

The times have changed since then and with the advent of the internet the task has become not less arduous, yet possible to achieve. So here we go ! The following ever growing list, based on the compilation of RICKWOOD 1981 is aimed at compiling a list of the largest crystal of any single mineral species known to occur. No matter, what size (that is > 1 cm, see below), no matter from which locality, no matter where it is stored ! Though this list can and will never be complete or finished, it is a possibility to produce a sound reference database on how large a given mineral species can grow.

To fill this list is almost entirely up to you. Every serious mineral collector has some well hidden large crystals of some rare mineral in his collection ...or at least has seen one of these crystals in other collections. Just let us know of your large crystals of any species and we will enter them into the list.

 

Please read the 'Rules of the Game' carefully before posting :

 

- Please go through the list below. If you have or know of crystals of a specific mineral larger than those listed or have large crystals - i.e. > 1 cm = 0,4 inches, see below - of a mineral not listed yet, than you are most welcome to contribute your information to this list.

- For practical reasons we would like to confine the list at the moment to crystals exceeding a minimum length / size of 1 cm in at least one dimension. That is : we dont want to upset any micromounter and systematic mineral collector - I am myself one..., but we want to document large crystals here, not more, not less. And there are lots of large minerals somewhere out there...even a microlite can reach several cm size ! Thank you for your understanding.

- The more information you provide (characteristics of the mineral, locality, history of the find, place of the mineral now etc. etc.), the better. A fairly good photo of the mineral with a scale, which can be published here, would be even better. And if you have a spare sample of the mineral / crystal in question, feel free to send it to us to add to our reference sample collection.

- We will try to do our very best to publish all information sended to us in a timely manner. However, it may take two weeks or sometimes even more, before your data will be online here. Please be patient. If you havent seen or heard anything for a month or so, please dont hesitate to contact us again.

- As default, we will publish the name of the owner of the crystal and his location, e.g. 'Mr. N. Smith, Crystaltown, Oklahoma'. If you want to stay anonymous, please tell us and we will just say 'Owner : anonymous', Oklahoma'.

- Though we highly appreciate any contribution following the above rules, it might happen eventually, that your spectacular 6 cm whatsoeverite crystal is outsized by an 8 cm crystal of the same mineral from another collector. Please do not get too upset, when we replace your fine 6 cm "whatsoeverite" by the new, larger one, as this is part of the game. You certainly know of other minerals worth mentioning here...

Thank you for contribution, and here is our email adress for posting.

And now for the list ! Please click here for instructions how to read it.