Ethiopian Opal

This is my last picture from the gem and Mineral Show at Cartersville. I really enjoyed the show as well as the Tellus Museum and highly recommend it as a field trip. This picture is of Ethiopian opals and the bits of color you see are the opals. The matrix is a soft material that can easily be scratched off with a fingernail. Some of these are the "new"  (recently discovered) chocolate opals and are brown (not surprisingly). However, I think the blue, green, and red ones are the most beautiful.

Decorative Polished Stones

These polished stones at the gem and mineral show at Cartersville were so beautiful, I just had to take a picture. I believe the ones in the foreground with the white blotches are called Chrysanthemums and you can easily see why. 

Mesosaur Fossil

This Mesosaur (Mosasaur) is the fossil of a marine lizard. They may be the ancestors of snakes. At any rate some grew very large and were formidable predators with their many huge teeth. This is a small one and thus not so spooky. It is beautifully preserved so that most of the bony articulations are visible. This is another treasure from the Tellus Museum.

Petrified Wood from Arizona

This petrified wood from Arizona is in display at the Tellus Museum in Cartersville. The first shot shows a slice through the petrified wood and the second shows the outside, perhaps bark part of the tree. I have been to the Petrified Forest and it is a truly amazing site.Huge petrified logs are laying on top of the ground. There are also small pieces laying around everywhere. Before it became a park, people used dynamite to blow the logs apart to search for crystals that sometimes appear in the rock.  These petrified trees occur over a large area and are also found outside the park. That explains why you can buy pieces of the wood as well as novelties like bookends made from the petrified wood. These petrifications are much prettier than our Alabama petrified wood, which appears very much like wood but looks like mud.

Beautiful Crystals

On my recent trip to the Tellus Museum at Cartersville, I found out that quartzite is a silica based mineral but it may be many colors depending on what the contaminates are. This huge amethyst is a type of quartzite. The purple color is linked to the presence of iron. What must the person who found this have thought! I cannot imagine the joy of such a beautiful find. It would be like someone in heaven sent you a special gift.

When Will An Angel Trumpet Bloom?

Want to know whether your Angel Trumpet (Brugmansia) will bloom this year?  Take a look at the stalk. After it branches, the flower buds will start forming, and once they start forming, you will likely have blooms till frost. Some years they begin blooming  earlier; mine are a bit late this year. In the first picture you can see the branching beginning and one bud hanging down near the top left. The second photo shows the branching but no buds yet.

Big Swallowtails

This summer had some of the biggest swallowtails I have ever seen. There were some huge yellow ones but I never got a good shot of one of them.