GeoClassica - The Key People

Stephen Moodie

With a wide and well-travelled background and the ability to speak German, Stephen has been a successful entrepreneur in a broad range of merchandising, including, amongst others, global demonstration marketing of European kitchen equipment, the founding of an American-style fresh juice and ‘smoothie’ manufacturing company in the UK, high performance automobiles and 19th century decorative pharmaceutical antiques.

Following this, he decided to concentrate all his efforts upon his real passion: rocks, crystals and fossils, a passion that began when, aged eleven, he began a collection of lapis lazuli, gulf pearls and turquoise from the souks of Kuwait. After a spell of sapphire mining in Australia in his twenties, his interest developed to include semi-precious stones, subsequently expanding into specimen rocks, crystals and fossils.

In 2000, Stephen founded GeoClassica as a company trading in rocks, crystals, minerals and fossils and, in 2002, met Richard, in whom he found a synergistic enthusiasm equal to his own. As a result of that meeting, Stephen and Richard teamed up to develop GeoClassica into a specialist company dedicated to the location of the finest specimens worldwide.

Richard Scull

Richard’s life-long passion for rocks, crystals and fossils began at the age of nine when some friends came upon a cache of crystals.

Later, he was to discover a magnificent example of a fossil shark’s tooth from the Gault clay at Folkestone, donating this, on request, to the National Collection at the Science Museum. Another find was a fossil crab carapace from the chalk at Dover, also donated to the national collection.

After gaining an honours degree in geology and zoology at Bristol University, with an emphasis on the palaeontology of soft rock geology, Richard spent eighteen years with DeBeers, the international diamond company, specializing in rough diamond valuation.

Richard’s ability to speak French contributed to his secondment to Kinshasa, Zaire, as Technical & Security adviser to the government’s diamond-sorting operation. He then spent seven years as a rough diamond buyer in the former Zaire, Antwerp and Johannesburg and three years working with the Russian government as a purchasing negotiator for the Russian diamond production.

Returning to England, he spent five years buying and selling crystals in the UK and Europe, in 2000, establishing his own successful business in East Molesey, Surrey, specialising in rocks, crystals and fossils.