Jewels of the Early Earth: Minerals and Fossils of the Precambrian

Amazon sent another book that was perfect.The material in the book, the content, is GREAT! Pictures and detailed descriptions - perfect.

Interesting book.

Excellent detail, beautiful color photography, very informative! Perfect for any rock hound, fossil collector, or anyone interested in geological studies.

Loved it so much I ordered one for a friend!

If you buy Jewels of the Early Earth expecting to see pictures of diamonds and sapphires and cut gemstones you will be disappointed. (Well, not entirely. One of the most visually arresting stones anywhere, ruby in zoisite--the wine-red of massive ruby dotted through bright green with occasional white zoned zoisite is here. This stone is often used in beautiful Tanzanian carvings and fetishes.)Instead, Dr. Bruce Stinchcomb's "jewels" is profusely illustrated with photos of semiprecious gems and ancient minerals in their natural or merely polished state. Examples shown are tourmalines and beryls, blood red chert-and-iron banded iron formations, rose and rutilated quartzes, Lake Superior agates and Keweenaw Peninsula native copper, the minerals of Minas Gerais, as well as more mundane but no less intriguing stones, like the flashy labradorite, which is rarely used for jewelry, but probably should be.In this book he concentrates on mostly igneous or metamorphic specimens of extreme antiquity with a rock needing to be at least a half-billion years old to make the cut. It's easily readable by anyone with a high school education and a basic grounding in geology and enjoyable if you just like pretty stones.Stinchomb puts these beauties into their geological time and geographical contexts. As with his other books, he assigns approximate specimen values coded to an alphabetical scale but acknowledges that some rocks have a higher scientific or educational value than their value in trade.Recommended for collectors and anyone interested in learning what survives from geological deep time.

"Nothing in biology makes since except in the light of evolution". This is a wonderful work covering seven-eigths of Earth's existence. The pictures and text are 5-stars. I would have liked Glossary and References grouped at the end (along with a glossary), but perhaps this could be included in a Kindle Edition. Thank you Professor Stinchcomb for writing this and Schiffer for publishing this!Addendum: p. 25 "...composing much of Alaska - the so called autochronous terrain." This should be "allochthonous".