Wodginite from
Strickland Quarry, Strickland pegmatite, Collins Hill, Portland, Middlesex County, Connecticut, USA

A decade ago, the author found a loose 4 inch mass of montebrasite, studded with sharply formed little dark brown crystals, on one of the Strickland quarry dumps. These were tentatively classified as manganotantalite, despite visual differences. The X-ray pattern was later rechecked, with wodginite in mind, and the fit was close enough to warrant a spectrographic test, which showed the presence of tin. Pete J. Dunn and Peter Cerny have since made probe studies of the material. The original mass was broken into several rich specimens. The wodginite is in equant crystals, transparent under magnification, with a few little tabular amber crystals of manganotantalite. This material obviously represented only part of a concentration of wodginite in montebrasite.

Several years ago, Bruce Jarnot encountered a small cleavelandite boulder, on the long narrow dump along the western edge of the hill, yielding maybe a dozen superb thumbnails of sharp, euhedral, reddish-black wodginite crystals, of a pyramidal aspect, up to almost an inch. These, too, were thought to be manganotantalite, until X-ray study proved them to be wodginite.

At that point, the author became suspicious of an iridescent brown mineral, embedded in columnar green elbaite, collected around 1950. The X-ray pattern shows it to be wodginite, in yet another habit. Obviously, the mineral has been mistaken for other things!