Geologist Metwally Hamza with one of his Geological Samples Collections, Cairo, Egypt

With the utmost pride and happiness, I want to share one of my most liked and remarkable collections of geological samples.

In this collection, I have an important set of very rare samples. Minerals, rocks, and fossils.

Between this collection, there is:

1) Petrified wood:
It forms naturally when the matter of cellulose has been changed by that of silica (SiO2). It has a higher degree of hardness than the normal wood in nature.

2) The altered bone of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh:
It was formed when the matter of the calcium and phosphorus salts was replaced by that of silica (SiO2). On comparing the two, we will find that the altered is very hard, but the other can be crushed by a slight knock.

3) Some of the fossils have different ages; one of them has a geological age of 1.7 million years ago. Such as:
• A member of gastropods: any member of more than 65,000 animal species belonging to the class Gastropoda, the largest group in the phylum Mollusca.
• A member of brachiopods: they are marine invertebrates, meaning they have no backbone, and are one of the few animal groups that live only in the ocean. They live in various places on the ocean bottom, including soft sediments, rocks, reefs, or rock crevices.
• A sample of trilobites: It's a member of a group of extinct fossil arthropods, easily recognized by their distinctive three-lobed, three-segmented form. They are exclusively marine animals. They appeared for the first time at the beginning of the Cambrian Period, about 542 million years ago, when they dominated the seas.

4) A sample of the purest glass in the whole world: this sample is made up of the white sands located in Egypt. It's known that glass made of this aforementioned material is very pure, but the sample I have is the purest one exactly because it was made of 100% pure white sand.

5) A sample of 99% pure limestone: It's a member of the carbonate sedimentary rock family that has a chemical formula of CaCO3. By geochemical analysis, we found that its purity is almost 99% or slightly more. Such consideration makes it one of the most pure limestone types in the whole world.

6) An anomalously-formed chert sample: It's known that chert is a member of the sedimentary rock family. It forms naturally by various methods. But this sample I have is not a normal one because it includes inside it a set of calcite crystals, which makes it off-beat.

7) More and more of the very amazing and inspiring samples for me. I mean by the term "inspiring" that it makes me fall in love with this amazing science. I mean geology.

Finally, as Hamza, I'm known for saying, "If geology were a maiden, I would marry her and pay my heart as her dowry, but that would not be enough for her."

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⁃ Taken and published by Geologist Metwally Hamza,
⁃ Academia: benha.academia.edu/MetwallyHamza
⁃ Let's Connect: linkedin.com/in/metwallyhamza