New Mexico Mineral Symposium — Abstracts

The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum's Permanent Mineral Collection has 14,250 catalogued specimens. Over the course of its 25-year history, minerals have been purchased, exchanged, and donated. Acquisitions have come one specimen at a time, or especially in the case of the micromounts, thousands in one acquisition.

The micromount collection is extremely important to the Desert Museum. Since many rare or unusual minerals generally occur only as microscopic specks, micromounts provide the means of acquiring as many species as possible that occur within the boundaries of the Desert Museum's interpretive realm—the Sonoran Desert region of Arizona and Baja and Sonora, Mexico. The micromount collections are valuable research tools. They allow researchers to see representative minerals of a given locality in one sitting. They provide mineralogists with a visual means of identifying other species by physical comparison when other means of identification like X-ray and scanning electron microscopy are not readily available. These are just two of the major uses for the micromount collections at the Desert Museum.

Micromounts have been a part of the Desert Museum's Permanent Mineral Collection since the mid-1970s. More than two decades ago, their importance was impressed upon the Museum administrators, which resulted in getting the first of the Desert Museum's micromount collection started. Through the efforts of William Hunt, Robert Mudra, Earl Pemberton, and Arthur Roe hundreds of micromounts have a lasting home within the confines of the Museum's mineral vault. Entire micromount collections were generously donated by Edna Andregg, Marvin Deshler, Jean Rogers, and Frances Saunders. The most substantial of these donations was that of Marvin Deshler. The Desert Museum is proud to own 4,625 micromounts in this valuable collection. The Andregg Collection numbers 2,069; the Saunders Collection numbers 833; and the Rogers Collection numbers 252. These numbers alone attest to the value of their acquisition to the Desert Museum. Most recently, the Desert Museum acquired a collection of 232 regional micromounts from the collection of the late G. Robert Massey.

Several Tucson micromounters continue the Desert Museum's efforts in adding to its micromounts. Museum docent and volunteer Mark Goldberg presently handles micromount repairs and additions to the Permanent Mineral Collection. Sven Bailey had the job in the 1980s. Carol Amshoff, co-owner of Tucson's Kino Rocks & Minerals, and Desert Museum docent Janet Reue demonstrate and instruct in the fine art of micromounting for Museum visitors at the annual Mineral Madness Showcase & Sale held in January every year. Arthur Roe was initially responsible for photographing the first of the Museum's micromounts. That tradition is continued today by Green Valley photographer William Meinert.