Please post the pix. These pearls are turning up more and more often.
No gemologist would be interested in authenticating it as it is not a gem. It is an oddity. It will never be jewelry.
The original pearl of Allah was authenticated as being a pearl; of tridacna gigas origin by Ralph Miner of the Natural History Museum of NYC where he was the non-vertebrae dude. He said, "Yes, That is a pearl or a calcalerous concretion from a tridacna gigas clam." That's how you authenticate it. Unless you have the shell.
Did you get the shell?
Steenrod's appraisal was entirely fraudulent. He based it on another earlier appraisal that was basd on an appraisal made by someone who never saw the pearl.
Have you read the story on the front page of this site? Well, it isn't pretty. It is full of lies and fraud and it was put up for sale by the thief who took it from Palawan for #million dollars after he lied about it being the pearl of Lao Tsu.
Now tell me, if the first one was a pearl cultivated by lao tsu and transferred to larger and larger clams and hidden because wars were fought for it. then the pearl and its clam were taken by boat- away from China only to meet with a huge storm near Palawan, where the boat and the pearl with its shell, both sank. The story was it was recovered a couple of hundred years later in 1934. Now, if the first pearl was a pearl cultured by Lao Tsu, what are the Peal of Elias, the carved box of a pearl you call the king's pearls and the one you found? they can't all have been cultivated by Lao Tsu.
When it was the only big tridacna pearl and it had the outrageous story about LaoTsu and and even more outrageous sales price of 3 million until after Cobb (the thief) died, when it sold to Hoffman and crew for $200,000 of which only 3-5k was ever paid out the rest reserved until the future sale. Then Hoffman and crew got an appraisal of some kind from a man who never saw the pearl itself, only the previous paperwork of appraisal, then Steenrod based his appraisal on the prior, fake appraisal and just jacked up the price with inflation.
The people with the log shaped pearl also posted it over here.
Now that there are four such pearls, they are not rare.
Also, I don't know if you noticed, but they are not pretty either. They are curiosities and if well promoted, can probably become Palawanese tourist attractions because there seems to be a regular forest of those giant pearls out there around Palawan and nowhere else in the world.
The true story of the original pearl needs to be told without exageration- it is good enough by itself. This greedy dude shows up and steals the pearl promising to sell it and pay the Pisi family. Then he is never heard of since, but the pearl starts rolling in Cobb's lies and bad karma and by the time he dies of greed, no doubt, Hoffman et al grabbed it by conning Cobb's family and then proceeded with one promotional lie after another including another visit from the family of Laotsu.
Now the people in Palawan have the chance to tell the entire story,
make all such giant pearls national treasures not to be taken from the Philippines without a special law or something.
You current owners of these pearls- the three that are in Palawan still, need to get together and get legislation to protect them and make them your tourist attraction. Forget about money for selling the pearls- that is not where their values lie.
