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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Monday was a mediocre 85-74-151 as the TSX Venture Exchange rose eight points to 564. Dr. William Lamb and Adam Lundin's Lucara Diamond Corp. (LUC) was nevertheless unchanged at 40.5 cents on 105,000 shares.

Lucara reminded the market late last week why it is spending big to add 15 years of life to its Karowe diamond mine in Botswana with a major underground expansion: The current open-pit operation has just coughed up another big, fine diamond. Lucara cheers its new 166-carat gem as a Type IIa diamond that it plucked from its coarse XRT unit at the mine -- an intermediate processing part of its plant. (The largest diamonds -- those weighing close to or beyond 1,000 carats -- are recovered in the megadiamond recovery circuit, the first stage of processing.)

The latest big diamond came from the M/PK(S) phase of Karowe -- acronymic gibberish that represents magmatic pyroclastic kimberlite found in the prolific South lobe of the mine. That rock has the coarsest size distribution profile, and hence the greatest abundance of large, valuable diamonds. It is also the phase that extends deep into the South lobe, which is why Lucara is eagerly pressing ahead with its underground mine.

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