Rock on...

It isn’t every day that you share a hotel room with £1,000,000 worth of rocks. Yes, you counted those zeros correctly, there are six.
A million pounds worth of rocks, they must be something really special!

I was in Scarborough last week in a hotel meeting room thinking about the future, not knowing that on a covered table in the corner sat a big chunk of the past. It wasn’t until the hard-thinking day was almost over that I learnt what was under the drab yellow covers.

We shouldn’t have really peeked. The rocks, left by a group of visiting geologists, were rare, priceless, so valuable that the carriers who had brought them to the hotel couldn’t get insurance to take them away again. They were worth millions.

Well, we just had to look.

The rocks were stacked in flat wooden trays piled one on top of another. The stacks of trays looked a little like a sarcophagus, reminding me of mummies and Christopher Lee and Hammer horror movies, each tray containing a series of flat cut slices of clay-like stone. How could these be worth a million pounds? Diamonds - yes! Ytterbium – yes! The tablets of the Ten Commandments – yes! A meteorite of glowing green Kryptonite – yes! But these flat grey slabs of nothing? They looked more like badly damaged kitchen floor tiles than million pounds worth of valuable rocks.

Anyway, I took these pictures and did a Google but I still have no idea what these rocks are or why they are so valuable.

Answers on a postcard please (better still the comments box).