Fun trivia fact: Pearls and amber are the two rarest known gems in the Universe.
Both of course are beat in that category by ammolite on Earth and blerh’talop on Talgox IV.
Amber is pretty much a natural form of plastic - the more volatile components evaporate or leach away over time and the less volatile components become polymerised and crosslinked.
What about cowrie shells? Specifically Monetaria monetawhich have historically been used as currency and for making jewellery.
At a guess, more common than pearls, less common than amber.
Hm, I wouldn’t have thought that fossils would count as a distinct type of gemstone. But the Talgoxian blerh’talop, while indeed rare and beautiful, is ruled out by the qualifier “known”.
Yes, that’s the one. The Saint series was one of my favorites, books and TV, and Chateris’ writing was definitely a treat.
As the article notes, money cowries are very common and widely distributed. I’ve picked them up on beaches in the South Pacific. They are certainly more common than amber.
That sidetrack reminded me of a story about George de Hevesy, a Hungarian physicist. (Note that this is completely unrelated to the subject of the OP, but it’s a cool story.)
From Wikipedia, “When Nazi Germany occupied Denmark from April 1940, during World War II, de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of Max von Laue and James Franck with aqua regia; it was illegal at the time to send gold out of the country, and had it been discovered that Laue and Franck had done so to prevent them from being stolen, they could have faced prosecution in Germany. He placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. After the war, he returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The Nobel Society then recast the Nobel Prizes using the original gold.”
Uh, your example of amber is a fossil. More fossil-based gemstones.
Where does one buy low grade pearls in bulk?
This looks like a legitimate site.