we are currently in the lab of Kats crystals who is going to be showing us
how to crystallize Megalodon teeth and other unique fossils or animals so we're
super excited to see this magician at work - not a magician, scientist - scientist
at work let's get to it so today we're going to be crystallizing two Megalodon
teeth these are commissioned pieces and we're gonna be crystallizing them in
something called mohrs salt and when mohrs salt is done it has this really pretty
seafoam green color and it looks something like this I don't use any dyes
in my crystals unless somebody requests a very specific color like hot pink
in which case I can use some food dye on a clear crystal but this natural green
color it comes from the iron that's inside this and I'll go over what
chemicals make up mohrs salt as we get started the first step in making any
crystal is we need to use some clean water so I like to get gallons of
distilled water I know that this water doesn't have any like gross bacteria or
anynthing in it and if you sink water there's a possibility that your water or your
crystal solution is gonna mold over time so we try to keep everything as clean
and sterile as possible so the distilled water goes into my water heater upper
very scientific of you oh yeah and we don't need to fill it all the way up because
we're only gonna be doing about 300 milliliters of solution today
now feels like waiting for water to boil some of these crystal pieces look so
good I just want to eat them hey don't eat the science sorry mohr's salt is a
combination of two salts so we're going to use today
the first one is iron sulfate or ferrous sulfate and the next one's ammonium
sulfate so these two are going to combine in the solution and make a
double salt so let's measure out some of each I am so thankful for this magnetic
stirrer stir stirrer-er so scientific again before I got this thing I had to hand
mix all of my solutions so right now we just added the ammonium sulfate to the
water the hot water so it's really important that your water is hot
doesn't necessarily need to be boiling but it needs to be really hot when you're making
your solution for this particular crystal because it allows the crystals
these little powder guys to break down into the water faster and allow the water to
absorb more of the crystal solution so if your water was very cold you would
see a lot of powder at the bottom that would not be dissolving just like you
can't add sugar to cold coffee or cold tea this is iron sulfate you can see
that this compound has a greenish tint to it already
the iron is what gives it the green color so when we mix it with our
ammonium sulfate it will turn that solution kind of a greenish brown color
and we'll do that in just a second
that's the grossest looking tea I've ever seen
I've noticed so far that you've got a bunch of different crystals with
different colors and it seems like you have different methods to do it what
kind of process did you have to go through to learn how to create these
different crystal solutions so the first thing I did was a lot of research I
looked up what were the easiest crystals that you can grow at home which happen
to be sugar and borax crystals not together and so from there I just would
look up one crystal order the supplies I needed and trial-and-error it so like
for example the mohrs salt took me much longer because there's multiple steps
and multiple chemicals and my first more salt crystal did not look anything like
this one definitely takes time so once you master one crystal and you
learn the techniques of how to grow it you can then apply it to a more
complicated process a more complicated process and then you just kind of grow
your repertoire from there over here we have some experiments that I have been
working on this crystal here this red one is called potassium ferrocyanide
it's not as dangerous or as crazy as it sounds this compound is actually used in
the film industry to help develop film or some kind of compound in film it has
a brilliant ruby red or cherry red color and again this is not dyed I didn't
dye this crystal this is just the natural compound - iron when it's
combined with different elements just like anything will have different
properties so here it's red in the iron sulfate it's green and there's another
one called ferrocyanide and that chemical is yellow so very different all
three have iron but all three have different colors - so you're sure
it's not a piece of candy - not a piece of candy - dang it and here we have some
excellent teeth that I've been working on for a couple weeks now this is their
fourth crystal bath that they've been in so far and you can see we've got some
pretty significant crystal growth these are really really vibrant purple crystals
they're called chrome allum or chromium potassium sulfate they have
a really cool tetrahedral structure so they kind of look like
square pyramids I don't know if you can see that one way out there oh
yeah so these are really really dark they can range from lilac light
purple to really really dark almost black purple like we've got here and
these two teeth are probably the biggest teeth I have crystallized so far
check out the other one- sure that is one awesome looking fossil yeah so again
these aren't the final product they're about oh they're almost there but not
quite so after this will come out of the bath and about like one or two days
we'll check on them and from there we'll do some cleanup touches seal them really
well and then they're gonna be ready to go to their new homes cool let's take a
look at our iron sulfate ammonium sulfate solution and we've got going on
right now this is nowhere near as beautiful as the crystals we showed you
earlier it's not green at all so to help the iron dissolve more readily into the
hot water we actually add a third compound sulfuric acid it's highly
concentrated sulfuric acid I only use about one milliliter per hundred
milliliters of solution so in this case we started with three hundred I know it
looks like we're almost at four but we want the solution before we added all
the compounds to it so just the water so I added three hundred so I add about one
drop for each hundred milliliters in this case three drops so right now I'm
checking the temperature of the solution we cannot add sulfuric acid to a hot
solution it will bubble and spit out hence why I'm wearing my goggles and my
face mask and my really thick gloves no joke to play with sulfuric acid once
the solution is a little bit cooler we're gonna add our three drops and
we're gonna see a color change it's not really a chemical reaction per se it's
just the iron becoming more readily soluble in the solution which is causing
it to go back to that green color that we saw so
it's going to go from this murky Brown to the green color okay we're getting
our acid ready
starting to really look like a starbucks Frappuccino over here you sure this
isn't an edible laboratory our mohrs salt solution is almost done we can see that
it's turning that really beautiful vibrant green color like we saw in the
beginning however we get really close you can see there's little particulates
swirling around in here and there's a little bit of foam at the top so what's
gonna happen now is we're gonna let it sit on the stirrer for a little
bit until that foam kind of goes away and then we're gonna move it to one of
these hot plate cooling stations I got over here we're gonna let it cool down
completely All the way to room temperature and then we're
going to filter it with this plastic funnel and a coffee filter this color
right here is the color we're hoping for it's very light green and we can see in
the bottom all this gunky brown stuff sank to the bottom and if you get a shot
from the top in right here we have crystals starting to form on the top of
the solution which is good that means that we added enough of our compounds
that there are crystal starting to form but it's also bad because we don't want
crystals to form too quickly if they form too fast they'll be small they
won't be very distinctive they look kind of like powdered sugar covering everything yeah and
too quickly we don't want that so we're gonna filter it out into our container
that we're planning to put our shark teeth in I have our shark teeth here on
some popsicle sticks we right need to go I had to I had to improvise because I
ran out of clips so we're just gonna good old tape that on there and here's
the other one these will lay right on top if you guys
remember this solution has sulfuric acid in it which wouldn't you mix these two
things together sulfuric acid will eat away at this tooth right so we only want
the part of the tooth that we want crystallized so in this case from about
from here to here in the solution and yes that solution will start to eat tiny
holes into the shark tooth it's not necessarily a bad thing the crystal will
find it's way into those tiny little holes
that it's making and it'll start to form so it's actually helpful because we're
roughing up the surface without damaging the rest of the tooth so they'll kind of
lay in it just like I have these back here only touching the solution where we want
crystals to grow I guess it is worth noting that you do want your container
that you're crystallizing things in to be pretty clean and the thing that your
crystallizing to be clean you don't want any contaminants because the
crystals will stick to them and not the desired object - that's Nalie, the science dog - she's also our protector yes Nalie
the guard dog here we have our last step of the day our shark teeth are
submerged into our solution just a little bit you can see right there
enough where the crystals can stick to it and start to grow we don't want the
shark teeth to be totally submerged because remember this is an acidic
solution and we don't want it sitting in there for too long because the acid will
start to eat at them so tomorrow morning we'll come back and check in on them and
then over the next couple days we'll check and see how the crystals are
starting to grow all right its been about 18 hours so we're gonna check on our
crystals that we put in last night so I'll start with the green ones right
here maybe yeah it's got baby crystasl Oh
congratulations toofy okay check on the other one, Oh more baby Crystals - you look
pretty so these are gonna sit here for a couple
days they'll keep checking on them making sure they're not too overcooked
all right it's time for the reveal on the big Megalodon teeth you've got to be
kidding me thoese look like amethyst crystals Kat
I want it can I have it can I please please have it that is so amazing look
at those crystals
you made that, all those are gonna look like that - I hope so
that's beautiful! Thanks, jeez! Alright the moment we have all been waiting
for Kat has finished her most recent batch
of crystal creations and she's gonna take it over from here so I'm really
proud of this batch they turned out really cool in my opinion this one here
is the one that we started with in the beginning of the video that was already
done these three smaller ones are the ones that were blank that we have
crystallizing over the past about two weeks and then these three giant ones
appear halfway done when we started the video and they are just beautiful in my
opinion I think this one over here is probably my favorite get a closer
look on that one although shark teeth are one of my
favorite things to crystallize they're not the only thing that I crystallize I
actually started crystallizing animal skulls like this raccoon about a year
and a half ago and I like making dome displays and shelf displays out of them
over here we also have this Beaver skull that I have done recently if you liked
what you saw here today you can find me on instagram at @Katzcrystals on
facebook at @Katscrystalz and on etsy to purchase some really cool crystal
creations which are linked in the description below so go check that out I
had an absolute blast filming this video if you guys enjoyed it please make sure
to like share it and subscribe to the channel and I'll make sure to see all of
you the next time we dig some science you crazy dog she's so cute