Hello all

I am slightly daunted by this site but very excited to be here.

I love crystals/minerals and I do collect them, I'd love to find more out about the background stuff now, find out how they came to be, where they are found etc.

I would love to go to a mine one day and if I could just collect one myself that would be amazing so I would love to find out about how people go about things like that.

I also have a few questions too, such as people's views on kogolong. I have a tiny sample and I quite like it but have seen conflicting information on what it is. I was told it's volcanic flint.. anyway I'll have a scout around first see what I can find here before ask things that may have been asked before.

See you around

I don't think it's the same, I don't have normal flint to compare to but I have novaculite which I believe is also a flint? But this one is white. They are both shiny and don't seem porous to me though I guess they could be polished which would hide something like that? Ok I have no idea lol. My kogolong is only tiny so can't investigate too much. But it does seem similar to novaculite to me but then I know nothing about all the technical stuff

Thank you Tim

Hi Joe

Well I'm glad twisted you liked the twisted tree haha. I'm a little crazy for trees myself.

Aww I was hoping kogolong was going to be a thing- partly because I like it and partly because I think the name is cool. I'll have to try some common opal and see if it seems the same.

Thank you so much for looking into it for me. I did try myself but I just got all confused.

Ooh I'm looking at the top picture and I'm kind of inclined to say you are indeed correct

Thank you so much for all your time, much appreciated... and thanks for bursting my bubble lol.

Oh well I can scratch kogolong off my wish list! Might replace it with common opal though, I do like opals it seems, I have some from mt shasta? Bacon opal and the lovely pink Andean... oh and an amazing green and black Andean tumble... I never actually realised how much I like opal!

Thank you so much Joe 

Guilby lol thank you.. I actually welcome bubble bursting. I have seen the site before searching for crystals but I was put off by the fact most of it over my head- formulas for minerals! I probably need to start at the beginning really go from there.

I can tell you something else, Dude; never be afraid to ask questions. Well, that goes for everything, but especially minerals. I have a quick story.

When I first started out, I was at a sale. An elderly gentleman opened up his basement to the public. Now this guy had every mineral you could imagine, tools that I could only guess the application of, charts on his wall that might as well have been in a foreign language. I went up to him and said "Sir, you have to be like the Yoda of the gem world, a true master." You know what he said to me? "Son, I am 92 years old. If there is one thing I've learned, it's that there is no true 'master' of anything, that is a term created to inflate the ego. In 92 years, I have never once stopped learning. If I lived another 92 years, I would still consider myself a student of gemology for each of those 92 years. New minerals are discovered, minerals that were never classified before as "gems" are now on the market as such, etc."

I've been doing this for about a decade now, and I still find myself learning. I've learnt from here in the short time I've been here. For instance, the stuff I've considered to be "flint" for over 30 years is actually chert. So, Dude, this might be a road you're "new" to, but according to the words of a wise old dude I talked to, ALL of us fit in the "student" category.