Fichtelite
organic mineral

Fichtelite is a rare white mineral found in fossilized wood from Bavaria. It crystallizes in the monoclinic crystal system. It is a cyclic hydrocarbon: (dimethyl)(isopropyl)perhydrophenanthrene, C19H34. It is very soft with a Mohs hardness of 1, the same as talc. Its specific gravity is very low at 1.032, just slightly denser than water.
It was first described in 1841 and named for the location, Fichtelgebirge, Bavaria, Germany. It has been reported from fossilized pine wood from a peat bog and in organic-rich modern marine sediments.
“Fichtelite” enters the record as organic mineral. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Fichtelite, organic and mineral can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 11, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q3744517. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1841.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fichtelite” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.