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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Tuesday was a weak 75-94-141 as the TSX Venture Exchange fell one point to 624. Dr. Ray Davies's Talmora Diamond Inc. (TAI) and Leni Keough's Olivut Resources Ltd. (OLV) are cheering the recent recovery of diamonds from a beach sand sample collected at Seahorse Lake, north of Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories.

The all-but-dead Seahorse diamond prospect wheezed a new breath last week, when Dr. Davies, president and chief executive officer of Talmora, revealed that Olivut had found a small crystal "that looks like a diamond" in a batch of lakeshore beach sand concentrate collected from the project. The status of the crystal cannot be verified, he said, as the crystal is less than 0.5 millimetre long and it cannot be examined sufficiently "for fear of losing it with further handling."

That begs the question as to how much smaller than 0.5 millimetre the crystal is, given that diamonds as small as 0.074-millimetre in length are regularly recovered in caustic fusion analysis and are described and verified with frightening rigour. (Indeed, the weights of such stones are reported in octocarats -- there being 100 million octocarats in a single carat -- and the smallest gems recovered might weigh a few hundred octocarats at best.)

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