When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
I NOW SHIP ON THURSDAYS
**These corals are hard to cut, as agate is very hard. This results in the occasional piece breaking during this process. I try to glue these pieces back together in the most inconspicuous way possible. If you are averse to this, you can usually tell a piece is such if it has a line through it, so you can be aware.
ON THE FENCE ABOUT THE PRICE? MAKE AN OFFER! I promise to seriously consider any offer made, and so far I have accepted most.
CHECK MY OTHER ITEMS FOR MORE!
This is a lot one Florida agatized coral pair. These have been cut by myself, so the hardest work is done! They will be great fun to polish! This pair is already partly polished!
These are fluorescent to varying degrees under a 365 nm blacklight!
Agatized coral specimens from Florida come from several different locales, but these would be from either Tampa Bay or the Withlacoochee river.
Florida is so proud of these unique fossils that they have officially made them the Florida State Fossil!
These corals were living 25 to 35 million years ago, during the Oligocene and Eocene epochs. This was a very different time in Florida, where much of what is now the mainland was a shallow sea, and there were many reefs and barrier islands. The types of creatures that lived in these seas and islands and on the shortened mainland would have been superficially familiar to us (mammals, reptiles, sea cows, sharks, fish, birds), but of very different and strange species most of which no longer exist today. These corals here would have been part of those reefs and islands.
As the sea receded, and Florida became drier, these corals were buried in sediments. Over millions of years silica rich waters percolated through these deposits, dissolving the inside of these corals while keeping the outside intact in such a way that in many specimens you can still see individual polyps on the outside. However, inside the dissolved chamber these waters deposited their silica, forming beautiful crystalline agate. Often, inside these chambers the agate is lined with nodular, grape-like "botyroidal" formations, or sometimes "druzy" crystals.
I used to think of agate as a purely mineral form, often in non-organic geodes, until I came across these fossils. In this case, the fossil has become a "geode" for the agate to form. These are very unique fossils, as most corals form in limestone sediments and are replaced with limestone or calcite, unlike the quartz agate in these.
Please message me with any questions!
