A gem collector’s delight, a jeweler’s inspiration, a museum’s prize display…these opals are rarely spotted in real time reality. The web sites picture them but do not own most of them as very few miners get them in their claims. So photos that appear in books or other’s we pages get copied and used and reused as eye candy on the site. 

Images of gem centered Yowah and Koroit opal centered nuts are infrequent too because the miners and owners tend to keep them secret. The Germans and the Swiss have been privy to viewing more of them than most because of the interest they showed very early in the acquisition of gem centered opal nuts of Queensland, Australia.

Not a true nut, these ironstone concretions have a nutlike look. Thousands of Yowah and Koroit nuts have to be sawn before a solid opal center reveals itself. This type of formation just does not manifest in the ironstone nutbands of the Yowah opal fields in quantity and hundreds of those that do must be found before the truly rare super gem center is found! 

This is a subject rarely covered in the information available out in cyberspace or in the written and published opal books and articles. I will be putting up more pictures and information on this valuable gem in the next two weeks. Keep checking back.