Publications

In 1999, Hawthorne and Henry published a proposed classification scheme for the tourmaline group. They reexamined the currently approved fourteen end-members of the tourmaline-group minerals and identified potential new end-members based on their  compositional variations. They organized all of them into three groups: alkali tourmalines, calcic tourmalines, and X-site vacant tourmalines. One of these, a potential new end-member alkali tourmaline, is fluorine-dominant dravite, which they designated fluor-dravite, NaMg3Al6Si6O18(BO3)3(OH)3F. In this article we report a significant occurrence of fluorine-dominant dravite in crystallized specimens of interest to collectors. We think this is a new tourmaline species, and a proposal to the International Mineralogical Association will be submitted.