CompuServe Messages

Hi Doug, I'm back from San Diego. So glad to back here in Honolulu! Found a few scattered fossil dealers and lots of Moroccan trilobites including whole multiple plates of 6 inch sized Andalusiana 5-8 individuals in glorious 2×2 feet prepared slabs! Too bad so much of the Moroccan specimens are prepared with so heavy a hand, bruising and really disfiguring so many of the specimens… Regarding Ureilites, I couldn't find the reference to Ureilites and Venus, though I recall the association somewhere, sometime. Here's some jibberish on Ureilites: Ureilites are highly a enigmatic differentiated achondritic group of meteorites with a coarse recrystallized mineral assemblage of olivine, pigeonite, and graphite in the form of diamond micro-crystals on the order of 10-40 microns size. The abundance of carbon very suggestive of kinship with carbonaceous chondrites and the abundance of trapped solar nobel gases suggest ureilites to be very primitive meteorites, probably of solar nebular genesis. The occurrence of graphite carbon with fayalite olivine in the recrystallized matrix without the loss of Fe metal from the fayalite via low pressure smelting processes supports ureilite recrystallizing within parent bodies of nontrivial sizes, at least 100 km or more in diameter, according to Walker and Grove (Meteoritics 28, 629-636). Remarkably, the nanodiamonds in Ureilites and carbonaceous chondrites preceed the formation of the Ureilite "parent body" and have Xenon isotopes (Xe-HL) supposedly formed in a type II supernova envelope. But th Venus connection??? Couldn't find anything! Joseph