The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Gemstone discovery helps Japanese turn coal into ‘Kuji jet’
An amber processing company in Kuji, Japan, has successfully commercialized fashion accessories made from a locally unearthed gemstone that miners didn’t even know they had until recently.
Kuji Amber creates jewelry using jet, a type of coal that is a gemstone. Named “Kuji jet,” the product sold out almost immediately.
Jet is extracted at the same time as amber. In Kuji, miners had been disposing of it as unburnable coal.
However, around 2014, on the advice of an appraiser visiting Kuji Amber, an investigation revealed that the coal was really a valuable gemstone.
Many Japanese have high hopes that jet will become the third local underground resource, after amber and dinosaur fossils.
Jet is fossilized peat, and it is mined from the same 90-million-year-old stratum as the amber found in Kuji. It is also called black amber.
The gemstone is in high demand in Europe and the United States — popularity that dates back to when England’s Queen Victoria wore jewelry
made from it for a long time after her husband’s death.
— JAPAN NEWS-YOMIURI
Two-headed baby turtle thriving at animal refuge
A rare two-headed diamondback terrapin turtle is alive and kicking — with all six of its legs — at the Birdsey Cape Wildlife
Center in Massachusetts after hatching a few weeks ago.
A threatened species in the state, this turtle is feeding well on blood worms and food pellets, staff at the center say. The two heads operate independently, coming up for air at different times, and inside its shell are two gastrointestinal systems to feed both sides of its body.
The turtle originally came from a nest in West Barnstable that researchers determined was in a hazardous location and needed to be moved. After hatching, turtles in these so-called “head start” nests are sent to different care centers to be monitored before their release in the spring, The Cape Cod Times reported.