| Unlike
the minerals, which were mostly acquired by donation or purchase
of private collections and individual specimens, the rock collections
were mostly field collected by faculty and students. In addition
to faculty research collections, it was standard departmental
practice until the mid 1980s for graduate students to deposit
a collection of rocks representing their thesis. Collections
of hand specimens from classic geological terranes were also
collected on field trips accompanying regional, national, and
international meetings. |
| The
rock collections are large and significant. They are divided
into four separate collections: igneous and metamorphic ("hard"
or crystalline) rocks, sedimentary ("soft") rocks,
and ores. They are organized into teaching collections and archival
(research) collections. Meteorites are rocks, of course, but
extraterrestrial rocks! This makes them so special that they
have always been a distinct collection. |
| The
rock collections strongly reflect faculty research interests.
Among the most important of the hard rock collections are those
of Professors Marland Billings (1902-1996) and Reginald Daly
(1871-1957). The soft rock collection is almost exclusively
a teaching collection assembled by Professor Raymond Seiver
( 1923-2004). Ores from Andean hydrothermal deposits are a particular
strength of the "mining geology" collection. |
|
|
In
the early 1990s the Massachusetts Institute on Technology
(MIT) transferred for preservation its petrographic collection
of ~3,400 specimens, which is particularly rich in local rocks.
|
| The
Geological Museum was founded by Robert Sayles as part of
the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) to represent geology
to the public, thus completing founder Louis Agassiz' vision
of a complete natural history museum at Harvard. In 1977 it
merged with the Mineralogical Museum. The Geological Museum
had its own display collection of ~4,000 hand specimens that
is separately catalogued and in storage. |
| All
of the stalactites and stalagmites found in the mineral collection
have been transferred to the Geological Museum collections
as a suite of cave formations. Similarly the geodes and septaria
concretions have been transferred even though they may contain
unusual minerals. The Richard Heck collection of sedimentary
geodes from near Bloomington, Indiana acquired and displayed
in the temporary exhibit "Gee! It's a Geode" was
also assigned to the Geological Museum collections. |
|
