While looking at the New Photos of today, I noticed two excellent photos of Alex, both showing a single, prismatic crystal of "zircon". My favorite is above. The other one is 1236214.

Zircon is tetragonal, and as such its crystals tend to show a 4-fold symmetry. This crystal does not, it shows a much lower symmetry, orthorhombic at best.

If I would have been shown these specimens without any information, I would identify these as titanite (from the Eifel area in Germany), because the exact same habit of titanite has been found in the same geologic environment there. Titanite is monoclinic, but in this case what we see are twins, and so it looks like a single crystal with orthorhombic symmetry.

Compare with: https://www.mindat.org/photo-1222714.html

and https://www.mindat.org/photo-1168045.html

Cheers, Herwig

It does look twinned (reentrant faces near termination) so titanite is a good visual ID

Agree with titanite. Message sent.

Thank you for messaging me about this, I noticed many other photographs from this locality with similar elongated tan crystals labeled as zircon. 

I also would like to add, titanite is not on the mineral list from this locality, so I will go ahead and add it to the list as a visual identification.

Sorry but it is not so simple!
Titanite was never reported at Roc de Courlande.
I think there two errors on the Alex sample! Mineral identification and locality !
There is very good localities for titanite on the Massif du Sancy like
Le Capucin
https://www.mindat.org/loc-123571.html
Le Puy de la Tache
https://www.mindat.org/loc-49421.html
or Le Ravin des Chèvres
https://www.mindat.org/loc-159540.html
even if they don't have all be added to mindat.org for titanite.

Volcanic stuff is very common on give-away table during French micro-mineralogists meetings, sometimes from several localities, labelling errors come easily ...

I will add several localities and references to this area as soon as I have time to do it ;-)

At last, please specially during summer holidays, it will be better to expect some days an answer from region experts before acting ;-)
Take care.

Thank you for more clarification, I will continue following this discussion to see what updates I can make to the specimens, or what other information I can provide. 

Make that 3 ... I would appreciate a pdf as well.

Alex: Can you check the cross-section of that crystal? Prismatic titanite wouldn't have a rectangular cross-section.

Sorry for the late reply. The cross section is not rectangular, rather it has angles that are obviously not 90°. I think they are titanite at this point, rather than zircon. 

Hello all,

Uwe, I totally disagree with you about the change of this entry status.
It should be maintained as "erroneously reported".
As I said before, we are dozen and dozen of microminerals collectors who years after years removed tons of material from there, without finding any titanite.
You're right the mineral on those photo is clearly titanite but the locality on Alex sample is clearly a wrong one.