What is Fool’s Gold?

While it’s exciting (and often profitable) to pan for gold or use a metal detector, how can you be sure that what you’re finding is the real thing?  If it looks like gold, what else could it be?  It could be fool’s gold which is actually pyrite. 

Pyrite

Pyrite

While gold is a precious metal, pyrite (also known as iron pyrite), isn’t even a metal.  It’s an iron sulfide mineral that has a metallic luster.  It is very common and found throughout the world, even sometimes along seams of real gold.  Sometimes it has a gold color very similar to gold, although not always. 

Pyrite is most often found with veins of quartz, another mineral, in sedimentary and metamorphic rock, and, commonly, in seams of coal or with other fossils.  Like quartz, pyrite grows with a pronounced crystal structure, which makes these minerals appear as conglomerations of cubes.

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