The Glenbow Museum > Collections & Research > Museum Collections > Minerals

The mineral collection has many interesting facets to it. It also includes products made from minerals such as precious and ornamental stone carvings made from malachite, lapis lazuli, carnelian, agate, crocidolite, rhodonite, turquoise, jade, and fluorite.

Ornamental Jade Carving

Petrified Wood (Pine), Holbrook, Arizona (Quartz variety Agate)

Holbrook, Arizona

The collection also includes a large number of fossilized organic specimens collected to show mineral replacement of organic material. We have many varieties of petrified wood, including pine and gingko. Other fossil specimens include brachiopods (shellfish) mineralized into pyrite, and ammonite shells mineralized into ammolite (composed primarily of aragonite).

Tonalite Gneiss

Acasta River, Northwest Territories

Although the collection is primarily organized around minerals there are also some important rocks (rocks are composed of one or more minerals). This tonalite gneiss specimen is one of the oldest rocks in the world, dating to 3.962 billion years ago. This is nearly as old as the earth itself, which is 4.5 billion years old.

Meteorite

Henbury, Australia

The mineral collection even has specimens from outer space! This is a nickel-iron meteorite weighing 35 lbs which probably came from an asteroid. It comes from the desert and is part of a 13-crater meteorite cluster fall. Meteorites can weigh anywhere from a fraction of an ounce to millions of tons.

Barite

Rock Candy Mine, Grand Forks, British Columbia

A large percentage of the mineral collection was field collected in person from mine sites and mineral occurrences throughout Western Canada by Glenbow's former curator of mineralogy, Mike Evick. This resulted in the Western Canadian Mines and Mineral Occurrences collection which is an important representation of what the West has to offer, like the barite seen here.