Yoshimuraite

Yoshimuraite is a cool mineral which is unsurprisingly only found in Japan, yet, you can still bring home this specimen to add to your collection! The hardness of Yoshimuraite comes in at 4½ and its specific gravity is slightly less at around 4.2. It was named in 1961 by Takeo Watanabe, Yoshio Takeuchi, and Jun Ito, in honor of Toyofumi Yoshimura (吉村 豊文) (19 August 1905, Nara Prefecture – 25 November 1990), Professor of Mineralogy, Kyushu University, Japan. He specialized in manganese deposits of Japan. It’s a “dark red to root beer colored crystals” and “a new Titanium Manganese Barium mineral”, but otherwise, not much is known about it… Wonder if the root beer colored Barite found at the Sirius Mine in Colorado may be also due to Manganese and Titanium impurities? Quite interesting either way, and this may be worth putting on your Bucket List to find when you make a trip to Japan!