Miracles of Allah - II

Bismillah ir-rahman ir-rahim

Assalaam alaikum

So, my husband, who really likes rocks, gave me the idea for this next Miracles of Allah entry. It is about a very rare gemstone only found around where we live (Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada) called ammolite.

You can see the brilliance of this beautiful gemstone, and the story of how it came to be is quite fascinating. Approximately 150 million years ago, giant shrimp creatures roamed the earth, though the earth they roamed was more of an ocean at the time. Anyhow, the ocean they inhabited was where the Great Plains of North America currently are. Eventually, something happened. Geologists and paleontologists don't really agree on what that "something" was--perhaps a volcano, perhaps a mudslide, perhaps a lahar (a type of volcanic mudslide). In any case, something happened and the creatures got buried under... whatever it was. Over time, the muddy substance that was on top of these creatures lithified (a compression process by which something becomes a rock) and became what we call nowadays "bear paw shale."

So, millennia passed and man came to be and all the prophets came and went and all of a sudden it was the 1930s (not hijiri, obviously), and settlers in Canada discovered ammolite for the first time (no doubt the natives had heard about it before). It was largely ignored until the 1970s and then in the 1980s Korite came to be--Korite being the company that pretty much has a monopoly on the market.

Anyhow, back to the miraculous parts (my husband told me a bunch of stuff about how much money it can be sold for, but I find that to be of less importance, personally), the skin of these creatures had a chemical reaction with whatever was on top of it all those years and that it how the colours of the creature's skin are so brilliant. The skin can be as thick as your fingernail or as thin as a tissue, so it is very fragile. Although fossils of these creatures (called ammonite, see left) can be found all over the world, the gemstone version can be found only around the Lethbridge area and a tiny bit in Montana, making it the rarest gemstone in the world. It is so rare there is hardly a market for it because so few people know about it, which makes it pretty inexpensive around Lethbridge. However, I find all the colours in the stones so beautiful, that I can't imagine it will take long for it to become a rare find all over the world.

Subhanallah, the creatures of Allah's earth are so diverse and wonderful. I hope you are able to appreciate everything he has put here for us, including the species of the past that no longer exist.