FREE: Rare Petoskey Stone Fossil Rock Gem

The listing, Rare Petoskey Stone Fossil Rock Gem has ended.

Rare Petoskey stone!!(pictured is the actual stone winner will receive.)

Beautiful clarity this gem of a stone measures apx. 1.5 inches across.

Winner will receive a rare hand polished and coated to make it shine Northern Michigan Petoskey stone! These are only found in our area of the world. You have to comb the beaches of Northern Michgan to try and find one of these rare fossils. What exactly is a Petoskey stone?

Petoskey Stones are fossilized colony corals (Hexagonaria percarinata). Their origin is traced back to Devonian seas that covered Michigan's Lower Peninsula about 350 million years ago.

The soft, living tissue of corals is called the polyp. A limey substance is secreted by the polyp, hardening into corallite -- a skeletal base which supports the polyp and keeps it from being buried alive by bottom debris. Petoskey stones found in Michigan consist of massive corallas of varying sizes. The limey skeletons were replaced by calcite or silica in a cell-by-cell process called petrifaction.

When glaciers scraped the bedrock surface, fragments of this rock were carried and deposited elsewhere, primarily in the north half of the Lower Peninsula. In 1965, the Michigan legislature became the first in the nation to select a fossil as its state stone.

Petoskey stones may be found on beaches, road cuts, ditches, gravel pits and sand blows all over the state. Similar fossils of the Hexagonaria genus occur in many parts of the world, but the "percarinata" is limited to the Traverse Group.

These really are beautiful peices, rare, and one of a kind! No 2 are alike! Beautiful to make into jewelry etc.