Utah Red Horn Coral

As far as I can discover, Utah "Rugosa" Red Agate Horn Coral is unique in the world.

Since they were around for a very long time, there were lots of opportunities for Rugosa coral to become a fossil and they can be found around the world. (There's another little known site in northern Utah but the fossils are small, black, and hard to even recognize.)

Rugosa is the name of an extinct order of corals that lived over 400 million years ago. (That is, five times older than the dinosaurs.) for about 250 million years. (That is, at least 800 times longer than humans have existed. See my blog about "Deep Time".)

The only other red-ish agatized Rugosa coral I know of is found in Australia and I was only able find just one.

Other Rugosa coral fossils are mainly calcite, limestone, or something else. There are some in Michigan and more in north Africa. They're gray and indistinct.

Since I started sending my dad's rocks to people, I have discovered that third-world jewelry factories have simply dumped on the world and destroyed the value of a lot of fossils. I wrote about how and why this happens in the blog, How to Price Rocks.

This seems unlikely to happen to Utah Rugosa Red Horn Coral. My understanding is that the original site has been totally mined out for decades.

My dad helped discover the red horn coral site in the Utah Uinta Mountains. I still have some of the coral that he collected. I still have a piece of native limestone with three perfect large corals embedded in it. I had it listed for sale for a while but I decided to pull it from the listings because I think that the value will just go up and up.

But as the cynic and writer H. L. Mencken once said to a critic who told him he was a hypocrite because he kept changing his position on things: "Consistency is the hob goblin of small minds." Tomorrow, I might not feel the same way about it.

Now ... your reward for reading this is my essay:

The Red Horn Coral Story