BEN, 7, FINDS RAREST QUARTZ ON EARTH IN FAMILY’S FIELD

A SEVEN-YEAR-OLD boy made a very special discovery recently, when he found the rarest form of quartz on Earth.

Ben O’Driscoll noticed a silvery metallic rock sticking out of a recently ploughed field on his way back from soccer training.

Cotterite is the rarest form of quartz on Earth and had previously been found only once anywhere in the world – in 1875 on the same patch of land the O’Driscoll family live on now in Mallow, Co. Cork.

The family had learned about the 1875 discovery on their land around 18 months ago and had even gone to Dublin’s National Museum to see the specimens.

Speaking about the discovery, Dr Patrick Roycroft told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘The key characteristic is that it has this pearly, metallic lustre to its surface. And when I saw it [in Ben’s sample] I knew in an instant: “My God, this is the real deal. This is extraordinary.”’

Ben said he was ‘really happy’ when he first spotted the rock.

‘I thought it was a diamond first,’ he told the MoS.

His mother Melanie washed it and the family soon got in touch with Dr Roycroft, being already aware of the work he had done on Cotterite (named after the first person to find it, Grace Elizabeth Cotter).

The family took the specimen to Dublin, where Dr Roycroft was able to confirm that this was the second-ever discovery of Cotterite.