'Baumite' from Franklin, Sussex Co., New Jersey

摘要

The discredited mineral "baumite", originally named in 1975 by Clifford Frondel and Jun Ito for NJ Zinc Chief Geologist John L. Baum (1916-2011), has been somewhat of a conundrum for mineral collectors obsessed with species naming accuracy. Several years after its formal description, unit cell studies of serpentine group minerals suggested that "baumite" was an apparent mixture, and it was somewhat arbitrarily dismissed as a Mn-Fe rich variety of lizardite (see Bayliss, P. (1981) Mineralgical Magazine, 44, 153). That designation, given prior to its formal discrediting nearly ten years later, has stayed with "baumite" among collectors, Mindat.org and elsewhere.