FMF - Friends of Minerals Forum, discussion and message board

[Pete Richards]

I've been trying to find a listing of the count of mineral species worldwide by Dana group - actually by the "old" Dana groups - elements, sulfides, oxides, etc., but if I got them by the new Dana classification I could sum up what I want. I know that each researcher's compilation will disagree with others about where to put some species, and the counts will change almost continuously with new species and splittings and revisions, but I'm not working at that fine a scale....

Does anyone know of a reasonably current table that shows this distribution among Dana groups? Or a clean simple downloadable table from which such information could be easily derived? I'm amazed, but I have been unable to find anything with several lengthy web searches.

There will certainly be those who would like the same kind of list enumerated by the Strunz classification.

It is ironic that we have some 4000+ mineral species, tons of information about them and their localities readily available on the web, but if we want to know what percent of them are oxides, that information does not seem to be available!

[lluis]

Dear Dr. Richards

As far as I know, Dr. Carles Curto, from the museum of geology in Barcelona, had the trouble to make an excel table with Strunz clasification
It is in the net.
Just placing filters or ordering by group could give the numbers

With best wishes

Lluís

[Jordi Fabre]

[TheBrickPrinter]

Excuse if this has posted before:
Not exactly sure what you need, but :

https://webmineral.com/danaclass.shtml looks to be a pretty darn complete listing and is easy to understand.

When I first started writing my mineral database program --when thought could actually sell it--lol, I thought seriously about including Dana Classification in it, but decided would be foolish with the information so nicely formatted and available on the web.

[Paul S]

I have been in the same situation as TheBrickPrinter, but I managed to implement a rather complete list of mineral species into my Access database. I used the list from Webminerals and removed almost all the species that are not IMA approved using Mindat.

So in the end I had a list of about 4400 species, with their names, chemical composition, Dana 8th ID and Nickel-Strunz 10th ID. I also add links to their pages on Mindat and Webmineral by hand when I come across them while using my database.

I have also added a few rock and 'mineraloid' species using various sources. And if i got a variety, I add them to the list as well, even though varieties are not IMA approved as species. This gave me an amount of 4602 species/rock types/varieties/mineraloids and it is still growing.

Just like Pete Richards I would love to get some interesting statistics from this list, although maybe more with a focus on my collection, like: the percentage of species I already have in my collection, how many sulfides I have to go, etc. This can only be done if you have a complete list to work with.

[Cecil Bankston]

[Gerhard Niklasch]

Would a breakdown by Hey's Mineral Index (based, like Dana, on chemical criteria) be of any help?

(WIth all due reservations about shooting for a moving target, with species having been discredited and new species defined since the 3rd edition 1993...)

Such a breakdown can be pulled out of https://www.mindat.org/cim.php with a modest effort. If I did my sums right the top level looks as follows:

84 Elements and Alloys (including the arsenides, antimonides and bismuthides of Cu, Ag and Au) (= Section 1)
16 Carbides, Nitrides, Silicides and Phosphides (2)
297 Sulphides, Selenides, Tellurides, Arsenides and Bismuthides (except the arsenides, antimonides and bismuthides of Cu, Ag and Au, which are included in Section 1) (3)
11 Oxysulphides (4)
164 Sulphosalts - Sulpharsenites and Sulphobismuthites (those containing Sn, Ge,or V are in Section 6) (5)
50 Sulphosalts - Sulphostannates, Sulphogermanates,Sulpharsenates, Sulphantimonates, Sulphovanadates and Sulphohalides (6)
274 Oxides and Hydroxides (7)
124 Halides - Fluorides, Chlorides, Bromides and Iodides; also Fluoborates and Fluosilicates (8)
89 Borates (9)
31 Borates with other anions (10)
145 Carbonates (11)
49 Carbonates with other anions (12)
13 Nitrates (13)
371 Silicates not Containing Aluminum (14)
11 Silicates of Aluminum (15)
280 Silicates Containing Aluminum and other Metals (16)
214 Silicates Containing other Anions (17)
90 Niobates and Tantalates (18)
301 Phosphates (19)
171 Arsenates (also arsenates with phosphate, but without other anions) (20)
76 Vanadates (and vanadates with arsenate or phosphate) (21)
103 Phosphates, Arsenates or Vanadates with other Anions (22)
18 Arsenites (23)
22 Antimonates and Antimonites (24)
201 Sulphates (25)
29 Sulphates with Halide (26)
43 Sulphites, Chromates, Molybdates and Tungstates (27)
60 Selenites, Selenates, Tellurites, and Tellurates (28)
8 Iodates (29)
2 Thiocyanates (30)
13 Oxalates, Citrates, Mellitates and Acetates (31)

Cheers, Gerhard

[Pete Richards]

Thanks to all who have offered resources!

Gerhard, thanks for totaling up the Hey Index from mindat.org - I had seen it there but not realized how easy it would be to get the numbers in each group. I passed on it initially because I am not familiar with it and did not know how similar to or different from the Dana classification it might be.

Jordi et al., I downloaded the Excel file of Carles Curto that you told us about, but it only has 42 entries! Is that all there is, or has the file somehow become corrupted?

The Dana listing at webmineral.com should be pretty complete, but on first try I could not figure out a way to extract counts from it easily. Was not even sure it can be downloaded (into Excel, for example). I did figure out a way, though it's pretty arcane. In case others want to do it, you can copy the data in a table, paste it into a text file, open it in Excel as delimited by spaces, add a column with the formula =len(cell to left), then sort descending by the length column. This causes all the species to float to the top, separating them from the lines that have group information, and allowing them to easily be counted. Still a bit cumbersome, but it works.

(I'm reluctant to offer to post my results, because I'm not sure whether I would be violating some copyright or other rights of webmineral.com, but if you do it yourself, I won't tell!)

I'll be interested to see how comparable the counts are for the Dana, Hey, and Strunz classifications, if Dr. Curto's list is complete.

[Paul S]

`I have been able to export my list from my database and it now counts 4391, mostly IMA approved, mineral species. It's not a perfect list, there will be many errors in it and the notation of the chemical composition can be different from the ones used normally. All species also come with their crystal system(s).

The way Pete describes the building of the list is what I did, but I added a list of Dana minerals and a list of Strunz minerals and combined them using the names of the minerals. Some minerals have no Dana and/or Strunz number (especially some new ones like Kerimasite). There are some varieties, nameless and discredited species in the Webmineral lists, so I deleted them, leaving 4391 species.

I would love to share the list with you, so anyone who wants it, just pm me (it’s free!).

Webmineral has of course the copyright over their database, but not over scientific facts in general. The description or a photo of a specimen is copyright protected, but not the name of the species, or its Dana number. That means that the full list can be made and spread without the risk of copyright infringement. (Please correct me if I’m wrong ofcourse.)

[lluis]

Dear Dr.Richards

The list of Dr. Curto is extensive, I have read it...
But I suppose that Jordi miixed links.
I will try to dig in the spanish forum, but I am two left handed.... Sorry

For extracting the minerals: if in excel, just set some filter, or order by any criteria that suit your desires. Just counting the files (b# file minus a# file plus 1) gives you the species under your criteria
For changing from catalan to english: substitute the last a by an e. It works for many minerals, except the early names (copper is coure; gold is or; silver is argent,....)
Rest of terms, I could try to set a data base to translate to english (I helped in a database for translation from english to catalan and spanish; so, not a impossible task)

Hope it serves

Lluís

[Jordi Fabre]

[Pete Richards]

Ah, that explains why I got such a short list. I'll explore the longer one for sure!

In the meantime, I processed the webmineral listing of Dana classification, and now that I think about it, I agree that providing a summary of it should not violate copyright laws.

I was interested to compare mineral abundance at Mont Saint-Hilaire with that worldwide. Without going into the details of exactly what choices I made along the way, here are the results. In the final column, the abundance index would have the value of 100 if the number of species of a given group at MSH is exactly what one would expect considering the number of species in each group at MSH and in the world. Values less than 100 indicate that that group is under-represented at MSH, values great than 100 indicate that it is over-represented.

It would be interesting to know if the results from similar localities such as the Greenland ones and the Russian ones would have similar representation.

Group Frequency MSH Frequency World Ratio Normalized ratio
Elements 5 122 0.0410 46
Sulfides 24 651 0.0369 41
Oxides 27 437 0.0618 69
Halides 7 186 0.0376 42
Carbonates 57 241 0.2365 263
Sulfates 21 320 0.0656 73
Phosphates 25 854 0.0293 33
Silicates 204 1259 0.1620 180

Totals 370 4111 0.0900

(Sorry, I don't seem to be able to control the spacing of the columns....)

Pete Richards