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Originally posted by JudgeSawyer
I have a degree in hydrothermal geology, and it looks like what's called an MVT deposit. That stands for Mississippi Valley Type, which do exist in Illinois. They are quite valuable as iron, lead, copper, zinc, and tin ore, but do contain traces of gold and silver on occasion. Yes, it is definitely a sulfide, as some others have suggested, and the ash you brushed off the outside could be pulverized limestone dust, which is the host rock for this hydrothermal alteration. If you saved some of the "ash" drop acid on it if you have any. If you don't, try vinegar or lemon juice and look for fizzing. If it's quality limestone, you might be able to nail this down. As for the burnt vegetation around it, no ideas. The lightning one sounds good, but highly coincidental.
Originally posted by JudgeSawyer
Well, Oreyeon, when ore deposits are considered valuable, this means by the metric ton, unless there are veins of gold, silver, or platinum, which have value due to their current price in the stock market. For iron, lead, copper, and tin ore, value is determined by percentage in the representative rock of the respective minerals within. In all reality, a rock of this size, even with sizable amounts of these ores, it would be worth mere dollars as raw material. It comes down to the refining process on a large scale. If we could determine where the actual deposit was, and it's size, you might be on to something, but then you would have to find an investor to set up a refinery. Alas, the nature of the minerals business. In terms of gold and silver, (extremely unlikely there is platinum here) it's hard to tell what you have from pictures alone. The crystalline gold and silver colored stuff is pyrite, galena, and perhaps sphalerite, all worth very little in small amounts. If you take a very close look at the quartz veins (the whitish, translucent parts running through the rock) and see smears of gold or silver, not crystalline, then you have native gold and silver. I haven't been keeping up on mineral pricing lately, but gold is very high right now. Now that's by the ounce, so it doesn't take much. Purity is the other question. One last thing, wash your hands after messing with it. That lead is in pretty high concentrations, and can enter your bloodstream. Don't get too alarmed if you handled it a lot though. It would take a pretty high amount of galena (lead sulfide) to affect you in the short term. Hope I could be some help.