FMF - Friends of Minerals Forum, discussion and message board

[Jim Prentiss]

Hello All,

I have a specimen of Strunzite from the type locality in Hagendorf, Barvaria, Germany. This piece I have had for many years it was in fact my first type locality mineral and I noticed then that there was a co-type locality in New Hampshire. I was puzzled by the term co-locality and eventually found out the exact menaning.

Recently I acquired Strunzite from Palermo #1 Mine, in New Hampshire and proceded to catalogue it as the "Co-type Locality", only now to find that Mindat no longer lists both of these localities, just the Hagendorf occurence.

The big question is, has this locality been dicreditied, is there an error in the Mindat data base, or has there been some change to eliminate co-type localities in general?

Thanks,

JIm Prentiss

[Jordi Fabre]

[Doug]

Jim,

If you fo to the Mineralogical Society of America website, on the left toward the bottom you will find a Mineralogical Resources heading. The first topic under that is IMA Reports. Click on that and find the the following,

Formal definitions of type mineral specimens, 1987
P.J. Dunn and J.A. Mandarino

There is a link to the PDF. You may find some of the other reports interesting:
https://www.minsocam.org/msa/ima/ima98
(link normalized by FMF)

Doug

[alfredo]

I must slightly disagree with Jordi here - It seems that many recent new species have multiple type localities, perhaps because many new species are found in such tiny sizes that it is difficult to perform all necessary tests on only one sample, and/or because "unknowns" accumulate faster than new species can be described, so a given undescribed mineral may well already be known from multiple localities even before the description is carried out. Having only one single TL for a species may make cataloguing a collection easier, but doesn't serve any important mineralogical purpose.

In addition, for pre-IMA minerals (before 1959), the TL was often not well defined, as our understanding/acceptance of the mineral developed in stages spread over time, and not at the single point in time when an IMA committee took a vote. We can consider magnesioriebeckite as just one example of this, among many: I consider Chapare, Bolivia, to be the TL because the first detailed description of its chemistry and structure was made using bolivian material (by Whittaker in 1949), although Whittaker did not propose any new name for the material. The name "magnesioriebeckite" was first used for japanese material, in 1956, so some references give it a japanese TL. Others give a Madagascar TL (I've no idea why).

Furthermore, the very concept of "type locality" is poorly defined. How large an area is included? If a TL is defined as the Animas mine, and I find another sample of the species in the Siete Suyos mine, a few hundred meters away ON THE SAME VEIN... some collectors will tell me that is NOT a TL specimen because the mine name is different. But if I collect a TL specimen in the Chuquicamata pit, 5km away from where the species was originally discovered at the other end of the pit, that's a "type locality specimen" because the locality name is the same. Ridiculous, because currently collectors define TLs by such "political" (mine administrative) criteria rather than geological criteria. It would make more useful scientific sense to define TLs by geological criteria, in which case a mineral from a trap rock flow in India might have a TL several tens of square km in size (regardless of the name of the village where it was found), and one from a hydrothermal vein like the El Dragon selenide mine would be a TL just 4cm x 20m in extent. Why do we not have a better definition of type "locality" yet? ...because this is a concept of more interest to collectors (and perhaps a few geologists) than to mineralogists. Mineralogists care about "type specimens", necessary for approving (or discrediting) a species, not "type locality". If a mineralogist tells you otherwise, it's because he's ALSO a collector, not just a mineralogist. (This is not a criticism of mineralogists - They are certainly entitled to emphasize different aspects of their work than we collectors do.)

[Jordi Fabre]

Great explanation Alfredo!

[crocoite]

It's not just newer species that can have multiple type localities. Take mawsonite for example. Described in 1965 from both Mt Lyell, Tasmania and from Tingha in New South Wales.

Regards
Steve

[Pete Modreski]

And when I look up mawsonite on mindat.org, it clearly lists both Mt. Lyell and Tingha as co-type localities. For strunzite, only Hagendorf is listed as the TL, and several reference books that I've just looked at, also only list Hagendorf. It seems that the problem lies with whatever source you had originally come across that attributed Palermo as a co-type locality for the species; this seems not to be the generally accepted attribution.
Pete