FMF - Friends of Minerals Forum, discussion and message board

[Tobi]

Hi folks,

today i took a trip to the Marburg Museum together with fellow collector Michael Ochel from southern Hesse. We had a lot of fun chatting about minerals and i took my camera with me to capture some nice specimens for our FMF community. Hard to compete with Gail's Tucson report - but i hope you'll have fun!

Cheers!
Tobi

P.S. Size information: The black labels have a width of 3-4 cm, the green ones of 6-7 cm.

P.P.S. I did not comment the photos because i also captured the label of each specimen. They are, of course, in German; but i think translating mineral names and locality information should not be too difficult ;-)

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[Tobi]

The last ones, i hope you had fun ...

[Roger Warin]

Lovely calcite twins.
Thanks for sharing Tobi.
Roger.

[Carles Millan]

Nice report, Tobi. Thanks for the effort.

(I believe we all at FMF understand the full text of these German labels by adding just a bit of imagination.)

[Les Presmyk]

Yes, thank you for this. I really enjoy seeing other museums and one like this that obviously has an active and current acquisition budget.

Two comments regarding locality information on the Arizona specimens. If you are able, please let the curator know that the red vanadinite specimen (IMG 4073) labelled rom the Puzzler Mine near the back/center of the photo needs to be corrected. It is not from the Puzzler Mine because there was no red vanadinite from the Puzzler. The vanadinite that is partially showing on the right of the photo is from the Puzzler and is correctly labelled. Based on what I can discern from the photo, I would say the red vanadinite is from the Pure Potential/North Geronimo mine in the Silver District, La Paz County, Arizona.

The second comment is about specimens labelled from Ray, Arizona. Unless a particular specimen was collected prior to 1960, all specimens from the Ray Mine should be labelled as follows:

Ray Mine, Mineral Creek District, Kearny, Pinal County, Arizona.

The mines in this area were all underground copper mines until 1947, when open pit operations began. By 1960 or so, the towns of Ray and Sonora were engulfed by the open pit and other mining related facilities. Construction of the Town of Kearny began in 1958 for housing for the mining company's employees.

The drusy quartz on chrysocolla was collected in 1997 when the mining operations mined through one part of the old underground workings in an area referred to as the Ball Park. In addition to the drusy quartz on chrysocolla, native copper on old mine timbers were collected. There was even a coil of rope replaced by copper.

[Tobi]

Hi Les,

thanks for your effort with these wrong locality information. In fact there are a lot of them in the museum, Michael and i discoverd several yesterday. Such mistakes were there in the past, and telling the curator did not always lead to a correction, because he simply forgets to change the labels or has no time to do it. There are even some other annoying things like misspelled mineral or locality names, completely missing information on some specimens, damaged illumination in some displays and even a Tsumeb specimen that fell off its base and crumbled in a display at the upper floor and no one cares ...

And you mentionend the "active and current acquisition budget" of the museum: Well, there are really good new specimens from time to time, but the museum owes most of them to private collectors who donate them. The official budget allows not that much because the museum belongs to the Marburg University - and our politicians don't like spending money on educational things ... i suppose you all know that problem, no matter what country you're from. Our museum benefits from the lot of private friends that it has :-)

Cheers!
Tobi