Minerals

Our collection of nearly 11,000 specimens spans nearly 100 years of combined curatorial efforts. We aim to showcase the wonders of Earth to the public, and to make information and specimens accessible for educational and research purposes. Roughly 37% of the specimens in our collection are from Canada (including ~26% from British Columbia) and ~30% are from the US.

Explore our collection using the table below:

• Search for a mineral species name, location, or any relevant term using the table’s search box (e.g. try, Vancouver arsenic). 
• Specimen number (Spec. No.) is the unique ID for each item.
• The “Cabinet” column identifies where the specimen can be found in our storage space. If Cabinet= “Pending”, the specimen has either not yet been photographed, or it has not been found. Work is in progress to complete this table.
• Species names in the Description column are linked to a corresponding image + details page on PME’s Flickr site. As of summer 2025, the imaging project is still in progress, but we hope to complete the images of every specimen in our collection “eventually”.

For details about any of the World’s thousands of minerals, search the publicly accessible mindat database at https://www.mindat.org/.

Licensing:  Images here or on the PME Flickr account are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.  For use where these terms do not apply, please contact pme@eoas.ubc.ca to discuss alternative permission arrangements.