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Can we talk about how wrong I was about chert for years...
I was hiking in the Ozarks last fall, picking up what I swore was flint for my collection. My buddy, who's a real field geologist, just looked at me and said, 'Dude, that's not flint, it's just chert... you can't knap that.' I'd been labeling every gray, hard rock I found as 'flint' for like three years. The moment he showed me the actual conchoidal fracture difference on a real piece, my whole collection felt fake. Has anyone else had a basic rock ID moment that made you question everything?
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jessicajackson1mo ago
Ugh, that's basically my whole life (with everything).
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faith2741mo ago
Honestly, the whole flint versus chert thing gets even weirder when you look at old property deeds. I've seen local plots described as having "flint ridges" that are clearly just chert-bearing limestone. Makes you wonder how many historic records are technically wrong because of that mix-up.
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