This is our thumbnail collection.
And mineral collectors have different names
for certain sizes of minerals.
What I've been calling hand specimen actually
can range up to quite large pieces.
And then there are toenails and these are thumbnails.
So we don't have any toenails, at least not
collected together.
So this is an example of a thumbnail, this size box.
And some mineral collectors prefer
collecting specimens of this size.
I think it's easier to get very fine crystals in smaller sizes.
And then the next step down is micromount,
which I'll show you later.
But we have a wonderful thumbnail collection
and it came largely in one donation in the year 2000.
So a lot of these are from the same donor.
And her goal, this donor, was to have a piece of everything.
So just because they're a little bit smaller,
does not make them any less valuable.
In fact, since there are so many rare minerals
and rare localities in this thumbnail collection,
we actually use it a lot.
And we love it because you can get
a lot of minerals in a smaller space.
Since we have species storage issues,
we actually really, really love the small specimens,
because we can actually fit them into the room
and keep track of them.
So they're fantastic.
And there again, this is worldwide.
We have them arranged alphabetically,
mostly because they came that way.
And we like to keep, as we've been adding to the collection,
we just keep it in an alphabetical arrangement.
And that works just fine.
So there are about 10,000 of them in total.
And again, they don't take up a lot of space.
So this is just perfect for us.
You can see, this is azurite.
You can get a lot of specimens and a lot localities
represented in just a small space.
So again, these are just really wonderful.
Compare one from Namibia and one from Morocco.
And one of my recent projects has
been to get this thumbnail collection fully catalogued.
And we've done a pretty good job.
I hire students from USC across the street to help catalog.
And we've gotten through-- I think we're at the letter T.
So we're actually almost done cataloging
the collection, which is really great.
More drawers, You see they're mostly full.
This is a lot of minerals.
This is a great one, beautiful acanthite.
You can see there.
When a mineralogist emails us, looking for something rare,
this collection is often where I find it.
We've got 10,000-- a little more than 10,000 actually-- the
micromounts we have 100,000.
We just have a place in our database
where we can designate the size of a specimen,
and we have thumbnails, because they're always
in this size of box.
We don't need to put measurements in.
You know, if it's a thumbnail, you know how big it is.
We don't remount them either, because they're usually
so well mounted.
They're really glued down and they're very well-protected.
And sometimes this little plastic box
also provides some protection from the environment, humidity.
These seem to hold up pretty well.
This is the smallest.
This is a micromount.
And it's this size box-- it's hard to see the specimens.
They're actually meant to be viewed under a microscope.
And we have approximately 100,000
of these in our collection.
And we would love to have more.
They're our favorites because they're
so small and easy to store.
We get a lot of material.
We get a lot of new localities we didn't have,
and a lot of minerals we didn't have in the collection.
These are fun.
These are gold micromount specimens, mostly
from California.
This is a really great opportunity
to see a range of crystal habits as one mineral again of gold.
These are beautiful.
An example, you can really see the beautiful crystal forms.
These same specimens, if they were larger,
would be obviously incredibly expensive and difficult
for us to acquire.
But they're beautiful, even small.
Just how many specimens that we have.
Since these are for the most part, not cataloged,
people really do have to email us directly
to ask what is in this collection.
But we have got them all alphabetized and organized,
so it is just a matter of running up here, pulling open
the drawer, and I'll know whether or not
we have a particular mineral or locality in the collection.
But it will eventually be incorporated
into our main database.