tavin
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Post by tavin on Feb 14, 2019 10:21:08 GMT -5
Great advise and that is is some incredible material and tumbling. After 7 to 10 days in the rotary with AO 1200 you could tweak the polish with 7 to 10 days with AO 14,000. I personally thicken the AO 14,000 polish slurry with sugar till it is a bit thicker or add pre-polished stones to the barrel till it is 85% filled for a gentle polish roll. Always nervous about banging rocks in a rotary polish run; it does not take much banging to damage the delicate polished surface. Again, that material is so fine as is the metal work. Looks so muck like wood, the fan is incredible. I sure would like to see the cross cut view to see the corallites. I'm not sure about bruising with this material since I've never had to identify bruising before. This batch doesn't have very many medium or large pieces it's mostly flakes between dime and quarter size, so plenty of padding with the ceramic. The skeleton must be able to rehydrate at least a couple percentage with water, as it changes from very brittle and easy to crack into something more flexible, and the layers become easier to separate. Almost every batch I had to pull out pieces that had separated enough to allow grit between the layers which I pulled apart, washed, and set aside to tumble again later. As far as corallites, I believe this deep water tree coral died and was reduced to a skeleton prior to fossilization. These are soft fan corals with extremely hard, smooth skeletons. I stripped the polyps off my fan, as it was dried after being caught alive. Here's an interesting question I've had. It's obvious that the skeleton layers have been expanded by the white material, whatever it is, But did that happen while it was still alive? It seems like it would have broken apart the layers if it happened post mortem. [Edit] I'm definitely not trying to add more steps! From the 1200 AO, I'd like to go straight to polish. So I'm going to give the CO a shot. Here's a picture I just took of some fossilized rough. I wetted it a little, just for detail.
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jamesp
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Post by jamesp on Feb 15, 2019 12:15:52 GMT -5
This material is extremely well silicified and should not cause any issues to get a tumble polish. The fan was preserved so well after being subjected to nature's abuse with so many delicate branches still intact the silica had to be well absorbed into the entire structure. The white fill seems to be silica and probably in the form of a very successful pure chalcedony fill making it a great candidate for an easy tumble. Thinking out loud, this appears to be a wood, the structure appears to be annular growth rings of a tree and not a coral structure. But either can be variable and tricky to ID. Similar to McDermitt Oregon petrifications and they often absorb water. Either way the delicate fan preservation is spectacular for a wood or coral petrification and extremely rare and of museum quality. The silica fill is post mortem and source likely from dissolved diatomaceous limestone judging from the white color. Consider that mangrove trees are aquatic and grow in salt water so wood can grow in an ocean habitat where limestone occurs such as Florida. The fan resembles the structure of a woody aquatic salt water plant. But plants and corals were insanely varied during prehistoric times and again hard to ID. The whitest of slurries from tumbling the coating off of Florida coral rich in white chalcedony silica fill from diatomaceous limestone:
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tavin
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Post by tavin on Feb 15, 2019 13:13:45 GMT -5
This material is extremely well silicified and should not cause any issues to get a tumble polish. The fan was preserved so well after being subjected to nature's abuse with so many delicate branches still intact the silica had to be well absorbed into the entire structure. The white fill seems to be silica and probably in the form of a very successful pure chalcedony fill making it a great candidate for an easy tumble. Thinking out loud, this appears to be a wood, the structure appears to be annular growth rings of a tree and not a coral structure. But either can be variable and tricky to ID. Similar to McDermitt Oregon petrifications and they often absorb water. Either way the delicate fan preservation is spectacular for a wood or coral petrification and extremely rare and of museum quality. The silica fill is post mortem and source likely from dissolved diatomaceous limestone judging from the white color. Consider that mangrove trees are aquatic and grow in salt water so wood can grow in an ocean habitat where limestone occurs such as Florida. The fan resembles the structure of a woody aquatic salt water plant. But plants and corals were insanely varied during prehistoric times and again hard to ID. The whitest of slurries from tumbling the coating off of Florida coral rich in white chalcedony silica fill from diatomaceous limestone: I'm looking forward to the radiometric dating I'll be doing later. That will put a date on it. Just for your knowledge and experience, here's a picture of this particular coral when it's still alive Like I said, I stripped the dried polyps off of my fan, it is not fossilized, and was caught alive as accidental bycatch. This coral is referred to as a red tree coral, and does have growth rings, although they are tighter and more compact than any hardwood tree I have ever seen on this planet. Because this coral grows at depth of over 2000', It grows extremely slow and dense. This allows the skeletal rings to form very fine. Funny story, my sister is a graduate with honors at the GIA, and has been a jeweler most of her adult life. I sent her pictures and she sent them to all of her colleagues that might have knowledge, and all she got back was "that looks like wood, but different than any I've ever seen in my life". It's the rarest known jewelry grade deep sea coral in the world, So I haven't been very surprised to not get much information back. It's Latin is Primnoa Pacifica There's a lot of coral misidentification online. For example, the coral with the halibut was labeled Primnoa Pacifica, lives in the same habitats, and is nearly the same color, but is a bamboo coral with a totally different skeleton. I have a whole bag of bamboo coral skeleton. I'll post that for you to look at in a minute.
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tavin
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Post by tavin on Feb 15, 2019 13:27:18 GMT -5
Here's some inventory from my coral box. Every bit of this coral was caught longlining halibut and sablefish in the gulf of Alaska between 150 and 450 fathoms. That's 900 and 2700 feet. Most is from deeper water, around 2000 feet. I'm also a hobbyist carpenter and woodworker, with a couple decades of experience working hardwoods of many different varieties. [Edit] The bag of bamboo coral is on the right there next to my fiance's bra that somehow made it into the picture. Funny story about the bamboo coral, is that I sent it home as a fully intact fan about 3' by 3'. By the time I got home a couple months later, it had dried and every piece had separated at the joint, so when I opened the custom box I made, all those little pieces fell out. It was quite disheartening.
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jamesp
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Post by jamesp on Feb 15, 2019 14:24:58 GMT -5
Smiling, I will never enter a debate about the ID of present day coral much less prehistoric varieties. A fellow that is a coral expert was showing me photos of one connected species of a present day medium depth coral that varied as if it were a half dozen species due to light exposure, depth, water flow exposure along and around it's structure. Corals that only grow in shallow water are often homogenous because of their constant habitat. Easier to ID. Apparently the largest grown organism since the last ice age is our coral reefs since most of them died at the last ice age. An organism composed of many species in only a few thousand years suggesting it is difficult to understand it's rapid population of complexity. Unfortunately this giant organism is dying at one of the fastest rates mainly due to polutted water which really confuses it's identification by it reacting to changing habitats. Pollution, soil/water runoff, volcanic inputs, etc into the ocean also occurred in prehistoric times certainly changing coral's characteristics. Coral is totally fascinating and am glad to see you captured an interest in it. This fellow was involved in a study similar to the article linked below. His job was photographing corals from fixed locations annually to study it's changes. To preform ID the use of DNA samples were utilized in most cases. An issue with one particular physical ID: " In the past, scientists have analyzed just 10 or 11 genetic markers in the three coral specimens studied, some of which have long, slender branches, while others have short and knobby branches. That previous research suggested the corals belonged to the same species, Porites porites." www.upi.com/Science_News/2017/08/29/Decoding-coral-DNA-could-help-save-reefs-from-extinction/4321504008260/
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tavin
off to a rocking start
Member since February 2019
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Post by tavin on Feb 15, 2019 14:33:27 GMT -5
I apologize if I came off as oppositional. For some reason I hit the submit button twice while trying to write this post too, dammit. Anyways, I suppose I can't say 100% that this fossilized species is the exact same as the living species, but having worked with both their skeletons for jewelry, they make the exact same variety of skeleton. The main difference is that the living variety skeleton is somewhat flexible and much more like a super hard fingernail, and the agatised coral is a rock. Here's a couple more pics of some jewelery I made the wife with non-fossilized Primnoa Pacifica when I first realized it could be done(first jewelry pieces I ever made, like 6 years ago). It looks pretty much the same as the fossilized, but is much softer. And the colors are a little more vibrant maybe.
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jamesp
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Post by jamesp on Feb 16, 2019 8:57:05 GMT -5
Please, the only opposition is the vanity in understanding the complexity of coral. I shared the opinion of your sister's colleagues in saying 'looks like wood' but who really knows. But you have living skeletons so you obviously have living proof that these are corals and they are mind blowers.
After many years of being in the plant trade I have experienced unexplainable 'sports', 'mutations', 'variations', etc of plants. But a single plant is 'mutated' from the bottom to the top of the plant equally, where a single coral can mutate to several varieties for the strangest of reasons.
And the diversity of plant fossils for instance, 300-400 species of fossilized palm trees found in Texas where there is only 9 species presently in N America. And a whole bunch of Texan fossilized palm-like plants that have unexplainable structures. This Red Tree coral is so unique. Thanks for sharing, quite a gem.
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tavin
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Member since February 2019
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Post by tavin on Mar 4, 2019 13:16:15 GMT -5
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RWA3006
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Post by RWA3006 on Mar 15, 2019 20:12:12 GMT -5
I like the grain in it. Seems mysterious, alien, primitive.
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