Based on specimens from Russia and Canada

At the 2023 East Coast show in Springfield MA, I was delighted to find two complex spinel crystal specimens from two different dealers. One, from Siberia, was large, sharp, and highly symmetrical like something out of a textbook. The other, from Baffin Island, Canada, was a pleasing shade of dark blue but distorted in a way that made its jumble of faces difficult to sort out. I bought them both, but upon further investigation in my hotel room that evening I was disappointed to find that both crystals were bounded by the exact same forms! Although I was initially grumpy about the coincidence, I eventually realized that models of these crystals would make a very nice pair. The completed set makes the similarities between these two seemingly very different crystals readily apparent.