What time is it?.... IT'S XENOTIME!!!

While we were diggin on the claim on Monday, my longtime friend (and co-owner) was getting into a nice pocket of gemmy smokies when he found a odd crystal we had never seen before. We suspected Zircon because of the crystal shape and it felt very heavy. After a specific gravity test it appears to be Xenotime. It is also on the heavy side of Xenotime which would suggest that the Yttrium in it has been replaced with a heavier mineral/element like Uranium or Thorite. It may have mild radioactivity. If I get the chance to test it for radiation I'll post results. If your wondering how to pronounce Xenotime here is a link with audio: Oxford Dictionaries

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The crew and I just before the rare find. (I'm on the left)
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Well, that's a new one on me, never heard of that animal before. Great pics, thanks for sharing!

I was goofing around the newly re-opened Old Stage Road last weekend and found a couple of small zircons - nothing as big as what you found, though. Good work!

RhodoRose

I would like to see a pic or two, big or small. This page could use another rare earth mineral to get it going.

After doing more research I realized Xenotime can sometimes be highly radioactive so I recommended to my friends to avoid contact until we can test it. I think my buddy might have a working geiger counter. He would know a bit more about the levels of radiation as well.

Fantastic finds!! Owning a claim just keeps getting sweeter and sweeter doesn't it Mike!

Great photo of you guys!! Keep up the good work in finding those treasures!!

It sure does! So far the mountain has been very kind and generous to me. About this time last year I set out on a mission to find out if I could turn my rockhounding hobby into a profitable adventure. I wanted to do it right which led me to this wonderful website. Now I am a proud claim owner, a proud club member and have harvested an amazing selection of rare and profitable minerals, all while working a full time job. I have even had the pleasure of seeing minerals that I dug from the Earth actually sell to an enthusiastic collector for a lot more than any of us expected. This has been an amazing first season for me thanks to patience, persistence, good friends and all the fine folks of the CP Club and website. Thank you!

Very, very cool! but..... yer givin' me ideas......

Here is a picture of one of my unknown minerals.

It is about an inch and a half long and growing on the side of a broken chunk of Smokey Quartz crystal. It is Semi-translucent and when you hold it up to the light you can see a reddish, purple hue to it. I seen you mention Xenotime and had no idear what that was so I Googled it. At first it looked like a real good possible fit. -Grows in association with other minerals, -normally a dark brown color, -can display a reddish hue to it, -heavier than Quartz. Those all seem to fit nicely and the first picture I looked at had a shape kind of similar to this specimen. But then after studying the description a little more I think it falls out of that category. It is much harder than in the "4" range and the specific gravity of this piece is not nearly high enough. I have to lean to this just being an odd piece of Root Beer colored Quartz with a show of Fluorite and maybe something else in it. It is not Xenotime, but it was fun looking.

Well.. it looks like it might be Quartz Woody. A specific gravity test should at least tell you if the piece is all quartz or a mixed combo. If it comes out heavy or light for quartz then you may have something different there. Zircon and Xenotime have a tetragonal crystal structure. What you have there appears to have a hexagonal structure like Quartz. There are a few rare earth minerals with a hexagonal structure like Bastnäsite, but Bastnäsite tends to have a flat termination as opposed to a point like Quartz. Sometimes knowing some of the rare stuff around the area helps. This Peak To Peak Website is quite detailed on what minerals can be found in specific areas of Colorado including many of the rare earth minerals and other rare stuff. Take a quick look at the mineral list on the first page. Lots of different and rare stuff to find in the Centennial State!

Tested the Zenotime for radiation. It has detectable radiation but very low, approx. 30 counts per min. Just above background readings.

Good! Then Jason didn't get that "warm" feeling when it was in his pocket.....

Hey Mike,

I can't find it now, but you mentioned something about an easy way to do a specific gravity test in an earlier post. Could you elaborate on that please. So many times I wish I had such a test at my disposal. When I heard you mention it I ment to ask you abut it but somehow it got lost in the sauce. Please do tell~

John Betts came up with this easy method but it works quite well. We use fishing line instead of a paper clip. A cheap digital scale will work. Got mine at harbor freight for $20
Quick test

Thanks Mike, that's great info to have!

This little test could have saved me mountains of time over the past decade. Now that I know it makes an easy way to field test minerals.

Bookmarked!
Thanks for this Mike... and thanks to Dan & Denise I have a digital scale again and can do this. I have a lot of stuff I want to test, will definitely help to narrow things down.

Yeah I really wiffed that Xenotime,

When I scanned the description of the mineral I reead a few things that right off the bat made me think it might be a good fit.

- Often grows in contact with other minerals, like on the side.
- Can have a redish huge to it.
- Heavier than quartz.


Well this piece fit those nicely. It is growing on the side of a Smokie, Red/Purpleish color, and it is heavier thatn quartz. But that whole 4-sidded thing is a no go instantly.

So for fun I did that gravity test that you mentioned. Of course I could not test just the one mineral by it's self and had to do the entire piece. It came up with a solid 3, heavy for Qurtz but light for Fluorite. Mixing the two I'd say it is just a fancy piece of Fluorite. But the gravity test worked, Can't wait to do it with other specimens. Thanks again Mike, Woody.
.

Your welcome! Your piece is very perplexing. The newer pic shows much more purple color which still looks like quartz (Amethyst) but it looks almost like it grew off another crystal (brown) which is shaped a bit odd for quartz. With a heavy gravity test it either means there are heavy impurities in the quartz or you have something else going on (assuming the test was near accurate). I'll have to take a closer look some day.

After months of intense mineral investigations we think we have identified another Rare Earth Mineral on some of our finds from 2014. After several baths in SIO some of our quartz and feldspar showed "micro balls" on them that were yellow to red color, and that are translucent to transparent. The tiny specimens have a greasy luster and seem to have a conchoidal fracture. Without more advanced tests the most likely mineral that "fits the bill" may be more rare than Xenotime-(Y).

Here are some pics of what we believe is Florencite-(Ce)
(Not to be confused with Fluocerite-(Ce). )

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MIKEY!!! Hell of a find buddy!!!!

30 CPM...of alpha, beta or gamma? What model of GM counter? Age of GM counter? Last calibration?

Not picking an issue, but things to consider.
I was out prospecting a month back, panned the sediments, and no colors found. However, the CMP was 120-ish, and the background is already 120-ish. Beta shield was not in place, so I'm not sure what the background CPMs are in comparison to the concentrates. I as expecting to get some elevated CPMs, and since it was indistinguishable from background, I'm baffled as is a couple of geologists I know. Hmmm.

That's why you want to know the CPM in either alpha, beta, or gamma. If you have 120 CPM combined and 120 CPM background, you could still have something. That combined reading could be 50 CPM beta and 70 CPM gamma for background and 90 CPM beta with 30 CPM gamma for the concentrates.

Very nice find Mike and great pictures!!

I know very little about radiation testing but my good friend has an old counter that has been in his family for a while. He knows much more than me about it and he did some clean up work at Rocky Flats so he was required to know some of the basics. When I talk with him next I will ask about these questions and if I remember right he mentioned that his counter was likely in need of calibration.

30 CPM...of alpha, beta or gamma? What model of GM counter? Age of GM counter? Last calibration?


Well COALBUNNY, the short answer is we don't know. The geiger counter is a friends, and it is OLD. I think he said the 1960's. It probably has not been calibrated since then either. My friend worked at Rocky Flats during the "Big Clean Up" some years back, and he knows much more about his machine, and how HE got the number 30 RPM. Mike S. (my brother) was only repeating a number he was told. I may have my friend test the suspected FLORENCITE-(Ce) for radiation, and ask him your questions. The counter was made for the Department of Defense during the cold war. And I have no idea what type of radiation it detects. For the most part I just wanted to calm my brothers fears that the crystal may be dangerous. I was pretty sure of my mineral identification (99%), and did not expect a high reading before the test took place. The suspected XENOTIME-(Y) crystal gave us a specific gravity of (5.0333) in a home gravity test. That number helped us eliminate some other possibilities ( Zircon, Thorite, Pyrochlore, etc..)

Some more INFO that I DO KNOW:

Xenotime-(Y) is a Yttrium Phosphate Y(PO4)
Gravity range (4.4 -5.1)
Mohs hardness (4 - 5) between fluorite and apatite


Florencite-(Ce) is an Anhydrous Phosphate of Cerium CeAl3(PO4)2(OH6)
Gravity range (3.457 - 3.71)
Mohs hardness (5 - 6) between apatite and feldspars

Welcome to the forums Dave!! Excellent info to know, thanks for adding it to this thread!

About time you hopped on the forum Dave!

Welcome back to the forums brother! Hope to see ya round here more often.

Thank you all! Some more interesting notes:

The Florencite-(Ce) in the pics also have other suspected rare-earth minerals, or rare minerals in the samples:

Yellow crust: Probably just limonite , but might be, or contain Liebigite ( a hydrated carbonate), Kasolite ( lead/ uranium neosilicate), or massicot (lead oxide).

Bladed pink crystals(in the last pic, just right of center): I suspect these criss-crossing bladed crystals may be synchysite-(Y) a rare-earth carbonate of the element yttrium.

Black, metallic, mass ( not in any of the pics ) : I suspect this slightly irridecent, stringy mass to be part of the columbite-tantalite group (probably Mangancolumbite, with the elements manganese, niobium, and or tantalum). But may also be another rare mineral called Todorokite.


....More testing, and expertise needed for some of these....

However these specimens also contain Hematite(small black spheres with florencite-(Ce), and red coatings), and chlorite mica (green).

Prospected Devils Head Area for the first time. Found some pretty good crystals of Smokey Quartz, Feldspar(almost amazonite). But I also found this heavy ,somewhat ugly rock. It was a surface find.

After some test and research, I think it is a sample of the rare-earth minerals:

Furgesonite-(Y) [YNbO4] --- (Yttrium Niobium Oxide)

*Black and Brown "waxy" mass to the left in Pic#1


Samarskite-(Y) [(Y,Fe3+,Fe2+, U, Th, Ca)(Nb,Ta)] --- (Yttrium, Iron"isotopes", Uranium, Thorium, Calcium, Niobium, Tantalum, ... Oxide!)
(also often contains significant amounts of Titanium)

*Ugly red "nodule" to the right in Pic#1


It is hard to find good crystals of these minerals, due to radioactive decay.

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The backside
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Great information and pictures Dave!! Looks like your onto some really cool stuff. You definitely have the eye/nose for the good stuff in the dirt. Keep up the good work!

I would like to make an update about the Xenotime crystal at the top of this post. After getting an X-ray refraction test at the Geology Museum, even the "experts" are having a tough time to identify this crystal.

It has the crystal structure of a Xenotime-(Y). And has the elements needed for that. But it also contains Thorium and abnormally high amounts of Cerium, Gadolinium, and Neodymium. Causing the "experts" to think that it may have various mixes of Monazite in it, or that it is mostly Monazite. But they admitted that even with the chemical data, they can't say for sure.

But everyone agrees that it is a very rare, and an interesting find!

The crystal (whatever it really is) will be displayed at the Geology Museum for the next year (in the rare-earth or Pike's Peak mineral display) at the Colorado School of Mines.

I'm gonna go see it, and get some more pics of the crystal, and a pic of the chemical readout for ya'll.

Very cool and congrats! That's an awesome museum. I was just there a couple weeks ago.

Wow awesome find.
Is there a way you can use a detector or Geiger counter to find more of that?
That's not a crystal you'd want to clean off in your mouth! Very cool.

Thank you Johnny,

Yeah, you would'nt want to clean anything at my brothers claim with your mouth. Lots of weird mineral deposits and elements.

I don't think a metal detector would work very well.(Mikes gold bug 2 does not even pick up the Hematite, or Goethite, both iron minerals.)

A Geiger counter might work, but most regular Xenotime has very low radiation. This one is an exeption, because of the Cesium and Thoruim content.

Here is a pic of the X-ray refraction results:

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Very cool Dave, that is very interesting, what a sweet specimen!

Sorry, in my last post I said Cesium, but the element (Ce) is Cerium. Oops!