Long before pollution, dams and dredging threatened freshwater mussels living in Indiana rivers and streams, the mollusks faced another devastating menace: Fashion. A nearly insatiable demand for ...

The rivers of northeast Arkansas once teemed with freshwater mollusks capable of producing pearls, which led to a huge "pearl rush" in the region in the late 1800s. The mussels had not been harvested ...

We Southern girls love our pearls. Sure, gemstones are awesome with glitz and glamour, but the understated luxury of pearls reeks of class and stature. Women in the South have long treasured that look ...

POWHATAN, AR - Fresh water mussels may be small, but they play a big part in the history of Arkansas. "We have one of the most richest mussel histories certainly in the United States," Catherine Jones ...

Quincy has always profited from the Mississippi, but never so directly as around 1900. And it all started with the lowly freshwater mussel or clam. In 1897 pearls and things made from pearl shell had ...

A great irony of pearl history is that the least expensive cultured pearl product in the market today rivals the quality of the most expensive natural pearls ever found. The price-value anomaly is ...

Embed <iframe src="https://www.npr.org/player/embed/1814851/1814852" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player ...

A new study suggests that 6000-years-ago people across Europe shared a cultural tradition of using freshwater mussel shells to craft ornaments. An international team of researchers, including ...

CAMDEN, Tenn. (WKRN) — Did you know that one of nature’s most beautiful gemstones, the freshwater pearl, is the official state gem of Tennessee? That’s because the only freshwater pearl farm in North ...