OH! That is you! It is so good to put this together! Thank you.
If I were you, I would hang onto that shell as long as possible. If you can't get a Natural History Museum to buy it, then when it leaves your hands, it should perhaps be a gift to a museum. The Museum of Natural History in NYC has a huge connection with the PoA.
It was Dr. Miner of their staff who authenticated it as a genuine tridacna gigas.
And then Wilburn Cobb wrote a story for the Museum's highly regarded magazine, about how he acquired the pearl. I think the link to it is on the thread about the pearl before I helped write the article about it. That piece of writing in that magazine is where all the lies started. It is one lie after another. Even when an informed reader wrote in reply to the article that there were no Dayaks on Palawan, no one else ever took the hint and questioned the article. And I am sure Cobb never thought the internet was coming and all decades old lies were capable of being exposed!
Did you know that the PoA has not been re-authenticated since 1937? Many porcelain replicas were made of it, but the pearl, itself has not been seen by ANYONE since the 1960's. It is supposed to be in a vault in Denver, but it was not even produced in court during the Bonicelli children's suit in 2005, which was filed in Denver, nor was it re-authenticated and re appraised for purposes of the settlement. And, it has still not been seen, even though the Bonicelli heirs own 1/3 of it and want to sell it.
This story is far from over. I have come to suspect that the pearl is no longer with us. Perhaps it shattered when they tried to take a core out of it for the carbon dating test Lee Sparrow referred to in 1969 or so, when he appraised the pearl, sight unseen, based on previous documents and a report of the findings of the carbon 14 test indicating it was no more than 600 years old. Which incidentally gives the lie to Cobb's story about it being 2,500 years old! The Lee family legend was made up by Cobb, fanned on by Barbish who claimed another meeting with a mythical member of the Lee family, yet it persists as fact in the Wikipedia article and its owner/"possessor" Victor Barbish resisted any changes Jeremy and I individually tried to make to the article giving the true story. It may be possible to change it a bit now that Barbish is dead.
Your pearl has good karma and there are no lies surrounding it. It is possible for you to detect the true monetary value. Or the true scientific value as an exceedingly rare specimen of T gigas with a pearl.
Whatever value is placed on it in the future should have NOTHING to do with the false and artificial appraisals made for the PoA! Since Cobb first claimed it was worth 3.5 million in 1937, all appraisals have been based on inflation since the 30's and thus are not based in reality.
Sorry, if I seem loud about this. I am passionate about seeing the truth being told about the PoA and for legal calls to produce it for evaluation for the Bonicellis. Produce the actual pearl and not one of the porcelain duplicates!!!!
