Early this month The New York Times published an article "The Florentine Diamond Resurfaces After 100 Years in Hiding" by Robin Pogrebin. While I write about fossils on this blog, in recent years I go to museums and study the fossils on display. Last year while in Vienna, Austria I visited Naturhistorisches Museum Wien. This world class museum is just too big to see in just one visit so I concentrated mostly on the fossils. When you enter the museum and go to the right it leads you to multiple of rooms of minerals on display. Before you get to the meteorite room there are display cases showing gems and precious items fabricated with minerals.
One display that caught me attention was that of "Der Florentiner", a replica of a 137 caret yellow diamond. The diamond has a long history which can be read about on Wikipedia. It was thought lost at fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918. As revealed earlier this month, the diamond has been in a bank vault in Canada most of the time since.
What an amazing story!
This image shows a number of crinoid stem column sections identified as Dolatocrinus (Lyon, 1857) from the Beechwood Limestone. The fossil dates to the Devonian Period. They were found in Clark County, Indiana USA by Barbara Conkin (1928-2019) who was a local professor of geology.
Picture taken at Museo di Geologia e Paleontologia Florence Italy (Università degli Studi di Firenze) in August 2024.
