The Famous Kauri Gum
While I am sure that this is not the biggest piece of Kauri gum ever found - it certainly comes close to it. This piece is about 85 pounds (or 40 kilos). Please understand that 85 pounds of gum is a LOT of gum. To give you an idea, this 80 pound gum floats in sea water.
This piece is for the person who wants a capstone piece for their collection. It is just huge. Probably the largest piece in anyone's collection in the world. Anyone who sees it, whether they are "into" amber or not will be impressed. It is absolutely breathtaking. This mammoth piece was found in Northern New Zealand. None of it is polished, but you can see color in some of the photographs. We do get a kick offering the impossible - this is an impossibly large piece of kauri gum.
To say that this is a rare piece does not do significance to the concept of rare. I challenge anyone, anywhere to come up with a larger piece of gum. You just will not be able to do so. This is a museum piece. Kauri gum is from a tree in the family Araucariaceae, genus Agathis. This is a small family of trees found in the northern part of New Zealand (Agathis australis) and Queensland (Agathis palmerstonii and Agathis robusta). It has been found also in Indonesia. Most of the recent Kauri gum is 10,000 to 40,000 years old. 
The fossil gum has been dated from coal seams to be 43 million years old. The Kauri gum (copal) that is offered for sale is not fossil gum, but only 30 to 40,000 years old. As you probably know, Kauri gum is almost impossible to find, and even harder to find for sale! To the left you will see a postcard that shows gum workers sorting the day's find. This post card is date 1909. Click on the image to view a much larger image of the same. Here are some pictures of this behemoth, enjoy.
