Home > Mexico II Type Locales – December 22 > MS1711 Spiroffite
Spiroffite - Sold
- Mina Bambolla
- Moctezuma
- Sonora
- Mexico
- 2.3 × 1.5 × 1.3 cm – Thumbnail specimen (fits into a 2.5 cm cube)
Spiroffite is a manganese tellurite. The mineral name honors Professor Kiril Spiroff (1901-1981), Bulgarian-American mineralogist at Michigan Tech, Houghton, Michigan, USA. Mandarino (1962) first announced the species and its complete description followed in Mandarino et al. (1963).
The manganese content of spiroffite imparts a rose red coloration to the species. This example has cleavage plates to 6 mm on a fragment of bull quartz matrix. This specimen came out in 2007, when exploration for gold around Moctezuma enabled collecting of a ton or two of tellurate bearing rock.
