This is the Dinosaur Bone + Amber Damascus Knife from the team at Santa Fe Stoneworks. Each is made with a handle that contains a piece of 150 million-year-old dinosaur bone and jet amber.
The blade is made from Steel-Inox 690-440c stainless Damascus steel with 11 layers, offering the ability to hold a razor-sharp edge without being brittle.
Santa Fe Stoneworks was founded by Bill Wirtel in 1978. He had been working in a corporate job but found it didn’t suit him, and so he travelled west seeking a new future for himself. He found it in Sante Fe, New Mexico where the local sources of high quality turquoise were famous around the world.
Bill’s family had a long history of working with gemstones, and his natural aptitude for it began to show. He worked with a local jewelry maker but soon realized he wasn’t particularly interested in making jewelry – he wanted to make more.
Before long he had gone into business with John Iverson, making a whole range of products with ironwood inlays, turquoise, silver, and more. Bill now works with his son and daughter at the company, and in more recent years they began using fossilized mammoth and dinosaur bones in some of their knife handles.
Santa Fe Stoneworks now sells their products around the world through dealers, and right from their own online store.
Each of these knives is unique in its final form, as no two Damascus blades are ever identical, and no two sections of dinosaur fossil are identical either – so the images used in this article will be close but not exactly the same to what you receive should you order one.
The knives are now being offered for sale by the outfitters Huckberry on a very limited basis, and when they’re sold out they’re sold out – due to the fact that supply is obviously very limited. If you’d like to read more or get one of your own you can visit the store page here.
Images courtesy of Huckberry
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.