The fascination for minerals has been a steady constant in my live. I started to collect minerals when I was eight and I really dont know why. No mineral collector lived in the neighbourhood, no active quarry nearby, no parents with any geological interest...But I started to collect !

The enthusiasm for minerals was just there and never ceased since then. Luckily my father supported me and gave me the opportunity to visit flea markets and my first mineral fairs; to explore lava quarries in the nearby Siebengebirge and the not so distant Eifel area; to take my first geological steps and collect my first specimen. Thank you, Daddy ! Later I decided to study geology, what I did at Göttingen University in Germany and at Rhodes University in South Africa.

Being a geologist and mineral collector for many years now - please feel free to have a look at my specimen trading list - I have had the privilege to visit some extraordinary places : some remote, some fascinating, some possibly dangerous, but all all of them interesting. The really giant quartz crystals of the Verloren Farm in Namibia, the unique geology of the mantle peridotite of Seberged island in the midth of the Red Sea, the peculiar calcite crystals near Sivas in central Anatolia.... they all have several things in common : their natural beauty, their fascinating size, their geological uniqueness and the fact, that all of them are hardly known at all.

Large and even giant crystals seem to be a somewhat neglected flower in the field of geosciences. Only a limited and widely dispersed literature about this topic exist, and only few scientist are working on this subject despite the fact, that the genesis of extraordinary large crystals is often poorly understood. Giant crystals are spectacular and should be ideally suited to fascinate a lot of people, especially those, who otherwise dont care much for geological topics. So why the reluctance...?

For my part I think that giant crystals are much more common than most people think and I believe, that many of their occurences are simply unknown even to most geoscientists. And I think, that these often fragile creations of nature, formed by rare and sometimes unique geological processes, simply deserve more attention in the scientific world and from the public alike.

Luckily we are living in an age of fast and worldwide communication. The WWW has changed the world indeed and things are possible that were unthinkable a decade ago.. The compilation of a worldwide database of giant crystals is a good example of what the Internet can do. So let´s start !