Sculptured Gold & Sterling Jewelry

Pearls are the only gem created by living animals.

The oldest known fossil pearls date from more than 200 million years ago.

To Ancient Greeks, pearls originated from lightening strikes at sea.  Romans imagined them to be the frozen tears of the gods.  For centuries, scholars from various cultures around the world believed clams were impregnated by rain or dew and gave birth to pearls.

The mantle of a mollusk will coat anything inside its shell with calcium carbonate to protect its soft tissue from irritation.  Usually, the irritant is a tiny parasite (not a grain of sand, as is commonly believed), which becomes the center of a pearl.

Many people think of pearls as white.  In fact, pearls come in a dazzling spectrum of colors, usually matching the inside shell color of the mollusk that produces it.

Imitation pearls are not a modern invention.  A recipe in the 15th century involved grinding up seed pearls, glass and fish bones, and adding snail slime and egg whites for binding.  The mixture was set in molds and baked in the belly of a fish.

When Ferdinand and Isabella told Columbus what they expected him to bring back from the "Enterprise of the Indies," the first thing on their list was pearls.  It wasn't until his third voyage, however, that he found them off the coast of what is now Venezuela.  The discovery set off a pearl rush that lasted 150 years.

Nearly every culltured pearl grown today is seeded from a piece of shell from freshwater pearl mussels, gathered from the Mississippi watershed.

The first person to produce spherical cultured pearls was Car von Linne' (Linnaeus), in the 18th century.  Although he is much better  known as the father of binomial nomenclature (he named us Homo sapiens), it was his work on perliculture that earned him the "von" in his name - the equivalent of knighthood.

Pearl oysters and edible oysters are only distantly related.  Parts of some pearl oysters are edible, but most "true" edible oysters make poor, dull pearls.

The largest known pearl, the Pearl of Allah, weighs more than 14 pounds and is about nine inches long.  It was found inside a Philippine giant clam in 1934 and resembles a small human brain.  Today, the location of this pearl is unknown.