Mineralogical and Geological Museum, Harvard University

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Mineralogical and Geological Museum, Harvard University

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The Mineralogical & Geological Museum at Harvard University (MGMH) is committed to the development and preservation of world-class collections of minerals, rocks, ores, meteorites and gems for research, education, and public display.

10/01/2026

The rock of the day today was collected after the Great Boston Fire of 1872 (the label has a typo on the last picture). Typically, we think of molten rock as erupting from volcanoes caused by heat deep within the Earth, but with a melting temperature of around 1200 Celsius or 2200 Farenheit and the typical house Fire getting between 1000 - 2000 degrees, its not impossible to imagine such a huge, multi-day fire causing rock to become molten.

09/14/2026

Rock of the day. Turquoise in andesite collected ~120 years ago with accompanying book.

08/17/2026

Elpidite from the Poudrette Quarry.

07/31/2026

Wallace Chan: Vessels of Other Worlds

On July 18th, the MGMH traveled to Shanghai for the opening of Wallace Chan: Vessels of Other Worlds at the Long Museum West Bund - the artist's largest exhibition of titanium sculptures to date, spanning 40,000 square feet.

Titanium, obsidian, and gemstones transformed into monumental sculpture and jeweled butterflies displayed in mirror-black obsidian cases.

Thank you, Wallace, for the warm invitation and for a dialogue between science and art that we treasure at the MGMH. The exhibition curated by James Putnam, runs through October 25, 2026. If you find yourself in Shanghai, don't miss it.

07/24/2026

The Mineralogical Museum at Harvard began with a friendship.

The Harvard Mineral Collection can be traced back to a friendship between these two gentlemen, Benjamin Waterhouse and John Coakley Lettsom. They met in medical school in London, and Lettsom imparted his love of minerals to Waterhouse. Waterhouse became a professor at Harvard Medical School and started his public mineral cabinet at the school with a small donation of fossils from Lettsom. In 1793, Lettsom increased the collection substantially with a gift of 800 minerals. In 1795, Waterhouse was assigned as the first curator of this mineral cabinet.

07/17/2026

Reading gold's hidden fingerprint to fight illegal mining. 🪙🔬

Our curator Dr. Raquel Alonso-Perez spent over a week at the Brazilian Federal Police in Brasilia for TraceFor Gold - a collaboration that traces the origin of gold by the trace elements locked inside each grain.

Why it matters: this chemical fingerprint helps tell legally sourced gold from gold mined illegally in the Amazon, where mercury contaminates rivers and communities.

Grateful to the Policia Federal team for the partnership. Science works best together 🇧🇷 🤝

07/10/2026

There is more to these beautiful minerals than meets the eye 👁. Read about it in the Harvard Gazette!

06/04/2026

We had a BLAST at the New England Mineral Conference! There were exhibits, talks, and mineral dealers up in lovely Newry, Maine. Talks ranged from hard-core mineral science to updates on mining progress in the famous artisinal tourmaline mines of Maine to the historical mining to museum conservation given by our collections manager. MGMH specimens were even used for post-doc Thom Chaffee's research .

We are always ecstatic to loan specimens for research, it's part of our mission after all!

Address

24 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA
02132

Website

https://mgmh.fas.harvard.edu/, https://tmn.fas.harvard.edu/

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