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Collections Manager of Mineral Sciences here at the museum.
And my job is mainly to maintain the collection,
keep it organized, maintain our database and catalog,
and also handle any paperwork regarding transactions
with the minerals, such as loans, destructive analysis
for research, donations, that type of thing.
Well, this is actually the main mineral collection
of the museum, and in this room are approximately 150,000
mineral specimens.
Many of those are micro-mounts, which are small specimens.
But these cabinets here contain our hand specimens,
which are larger minerals and rocks.
And a real strength of this particular collection
is minerals of California.
We have, as far as we know, the largest, most expensive
collection of California minerals, which makes
sense, as we're the Museum of Los Angeles County.
So we actually keep the California minerals
in separate cabinets from the rest of the worldwide mineral
collections.
So all of these metal cabinets along the wall
here are California, and they're organized geographically
from Northern California, down to Southern California,
and then around the corner there, we actually
have all the way to Los Angeles County.
So we get, sort of, farther away from home,
and then we end with right at home.
So this, in particular, is San Diego County,
which we're very, very strong in Southern California minerals.
Not as much in Northern California.
But these are some of my favorites,
because the peninsula ranges are loaded with pegmatites.
So the minerals are beautiful and I never get tired
of looking at them.
So for example, some of the minerals here are my favorites.
These are tourmalines.
This, in particular, is the Himalaya Mine in Mesa Grande,
and as you can see, these are just spectacular specimens.
Not good enough to be part of our display,
but again, this represents 100 years
of collecting at this mine, and so, just having it
here as a resource is fantastic.
These are both tourmaline, elbaite tourmaline.
So just to show you a couple more things.
Again, these are elbaite tourmaline from the Stewart
Mine in Pala, in San Diego County.
So really, really beautiful specimens,
but again, they aren't just valuable
because it's a lovely tourmaline crystal.
These pegmatites actually have a lot of rare minerals,
too, that are of particular interest
to geologists and other scientists.
So we have not only aesthetic specimens,
but for example, we make an effort
to collect rare, unusual specimens.
And again, these are not always as pretty as the tourmalines.
These are, I think, lithiophilites.
We try to have as complete a collection from a locality as
possible, so we want an example of every mineral that
is known to be found at a particular mine.
So that's just something we really
make an effort to try to know what we're missing
and then make sure that we eventually
acquire that material so that we have a complete collection.
We want to have the full context.
Actually we want to know what is going on geologically.
You do want to have as mineralogically
complete as possible.
So again, right now, we don't necessarily even
need any more tourmaline from this mine.
I think we have enough probably to keep
people happy for a long time.
But we don't necessarily have all of the rare phosphates,
so we still are on the lookout for those.
How do you choose?
That's a beautiful crystal.
Again, not good enough for display,
so this is, in theory, waiting here in case somebody
does have a scientific use this mineral.
Whether that day will ever come?
For example, this is all boron, which
is, they're not the most beautiful minerals,
but for Southern California, they're
very, very economic important mineral.
And we do have a really good and large collection of borate
from boron.
Then moving here, we have minerals from Death Valley.
And let's see, again, Kern County over here.
So this is geographic, so we're basically
going north to south here.
And I don't know, these are Anza-Borrego Desert minerals.
Again, California, it's a large state,
with really, really diverse geology,
so the rocks and minerals are very diverse.
And even in one little area, one part of one county,
you're going to get a huge change in the types of rocks
that you see.
Again, we were on a subduction zone
for many millions of years, which
means little bits of island arc are smashed into the coast.
And so you get rocks right next to each other that
are not related at all, other than they're smashed together.
So it's really quite fun to see these drawers
and just to see the range of specimens
that you get in one place.
This is just to show you another piece out of our drawers.
This is a benitoite specimen from the Benitoite Gem
Mine, San Benito County.
And we have a lot of this material, and it's really,
it's important.
This is California's State Gemstone
and is the only occurrence in the world
of this mineral in larger crystals.
So it's a really unusual geological setting,
where you get these veins of natrolite,
and inside the veins are rare minerals
like benitoite, neptunite, joaquinite.
And obviously, the blue crystals are the benitoite.
This is the vein here of natrolite, the white material,
which is normally dissolved away to expose the larger crystals.
The black is the neptunite crystals.
There's some tiny orange crystal here
that I think are joaquinite.
And yeah, again, just a really unusual geological environment.
This is, like, I don't even understand it,
exactly how this formed.
But definitely a result of California's location
on the subduction zone, and strange metamorphic rocks,
and hydrothermal activity interacting and creating
an environment unique in the world.
There is benitoite in other localities around the world,
but not like this.
Not in large crystals that you can see
that are so finely-formed.
So obviously, benitoite is one of our favorite minerals
here, since it's a California mineral.
So again, this is a fun piece that
shows the host rock, the vein, and many different associated
minerals.
So this is a fun specimen.