Is this petrified amber???

[patraney]

I found this in my petrified wood collection... Do you think it is amber? If so how rare a find is this?

 

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[Indian Steve]

Can you chip a tiny piece off? If so hold a flame to it and see if it burns. Check out the smell if it does. I have some that smells just like pine.

 

[Las Vegas Bob]

Can you chip a tiny piece off? If so hold a flame to it and see if it burns. Check out the smell if it does. I have some that smells just like pine.

Or just heat a needle, holding it with pliers of course and see if it will go into a one of the nodules if it does check for pine smell as mentioned above.


BTW nice find, looks like a limb cast to me and the nodules look as if they could be amber. If they are indeed amber I'd say you have a rare find.

 

[patraney]

No it does not chip and a hot needle will not penetrate it.... It is definitely oozing out the wood though. Thanks for your help..

 

[huntsman53]

While I believe that the nodules/droplets are Amber, due to the O.P.'s testing of them, they are apparently not what we would normally refer to as Amber! The hardest Amber comes from Myanmar with a hardness of 3.0 and close behind is Amber from the Baltic regions with a hardness of 2.0-2.5 but the nodules/droplets in the O.P.'s petrified wood specimen are apparently much harder. This leads me to believe that they mixed with other substances as they were squeezed out of the wood and they actually went through a process where they became agatized. I could be wrong but them having the lack of the rich orangish/yellow, orangish/brown or yellow/brown colors often seen in the variety of Amber specimens from around the world and due to them being extremely hard and impervious to a heated pin/needle, leads me to believe that the nodules/droplets are agatized. Also, the appearance of the inside of some of the broken shattered nodules/droplets, point to this as well as they appear somewhat crystalline.


Frank

 

[Inyo]

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