New Mexico Mineral Symposium — Abstracts

The University of Texas at El Paso has two separate mineral, exotic rock, and fossil collec-tions. The Centennial Museum and the Department of Geological Sciences house these collections that include a wide variety of specimens primarily from west Texas, New Mexico, Mexico, and other parts of the world. The collections are curated separately and provide the public with samples from instructional to splendid.

The collections, located throughout the new Geological Sciences building, include micro-minerals, hand-sized, and large specimens of calcite, gypsum, celestite, halite, fluorite, and quartz. The economic mineral and rock collections include many specimens of azurite, malachite, Mississippi Valley-type lead and zinc minerals, Carlsbad area potash minerals, Mexican sulfide mineral assem¬blages, and west Texas talc, sulfur, barite, and fluorite. The fossil displays include specimens of ammonite, trilobite, fern, and glyptodon.

The Centennial Museum, across the street from the department building, presents a larger display of fossils that include specimens of glyptodon, ammonite, and fossils from the Cretaceous sediments around Sierra de Cristo Rey and from the Paleozoic rocks of the Franklin Mountains. Mineral specimens featured here include a large desert rose of barite, many wulfenite crystals, quartz, gypsum, calcite, native copper and other copper minerals, tetrahedrite, galena, native sulfur, and pegmatitic feldspar.

These facilities are open to the general public during the academic year. Group tours led by UTEP students are available with prior notice.