www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNa...

A great quote from Arthur:
"One of the amazing things about ancient Chinese poetry is how present-tense they are, that you can read a poem by a poet such as Tao Yuanming, who died in 427 CE. He's got this great image of truth, and he says, I wish to tell you but lose the words..."

I'm not sure why this matters so much to me, but I am intensely drawn to collect minerals named after people I know or have met. I have 12 such minerals in my collection, including this Alexearlite from that auction.

At this year's NCMA we had a boisterous auction with one exceedingly small specimen of this new mineral. (Frankly, there is probably less than a thimble-full of this mineral on Earth, so this 2 mm specimen with 20 micron crystals represents a significant portion of the planetary occurrence!)

It is a tribute to the love and respect that the community felt for Alex that the mineral he helped discover at the ironically named "Lucky Boy Mine" has been officially named Alexearlite.

We all knew that it was just a matter of time before Alex received the greatest collecting honor: to discover a new mineral and have it named for yourself. This generally only happens if the eponym has contributed to the science of mineralogy, and Alex certainly fulfilled that role.

Perhaps more on the nose, Alex was my daughter's age. Alex was the kind of person who loved to help other people, eagerly sharing specimens and knowledge and I was the recipient of many of his tutoring sessions.

2 years ago, the mineral collecting world was shoced that our prodigious young colleague, Alex Earl, had passed away. This hit very close as I had visited with Alex at NCMA a month before, and spent a day collecting with him at one of his favorite sites (the North Star Mine in Utah) a year earlier.

Congratulations Jolyon!
I've only got one legit paper in my credits as the photographer (a herbertsmithite crystal) but that's due to the PhD student author finding it on mindat.

@ninaturns60.bsky.social

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Thanks Steve. The association makes sense, but connellite should be hexagonal crystals and these are flat blades, more like aurichalcite (of course this is too blue for that.) Maybe cyanotrichite?
I'll see if I can get a good termination image with higher magnification.

Here's the 8 cm rock
Linarite and unknown blue sprays from Leadville Mining Dist., Lake Co., CO