Gem Collection to be unveiled in August thanks to efforts

PUEBLO – A geology collection at Colorado State University-Pueblo will no longer be “hidden gems” thanks to the work of a group of undergraduate students who are preparing them for display this fall.

Schyler Kline, a biology major and geology minor, has spent the summer as project leader of the CSU-Pueblo Geology Collection, working on a display case that will share a portion of more than 1,000 mineral specimens that were boxed and stored in the Colorado Fuel and Iron (CF&I) archives since the 1980s. Kline became involved with this project in 2010 as an AmeriCorps member at Pueblo Community College. Kline’s assignment was to unearth specimens and identify the specimens by color, chemical chemistry, and size then classify the specimens. The specimens were packed in old, rusty, and deteriorating boxes. While Kline left the project in Oct. 2011, he restarted the work in 2013 with the help of Dean of Science and Mathematics Dr. Rick Kreminski. Kline will have a team of four students working with him on this project starting in the fall.

The display will be unveiled on campus in August on the third floor of the Library and Academic Resources Center (LARC) with additional displays in the Department of Chemistry and the Steelworks (CF&I) Museum, 215 Canal St.  The LARC display will have 25 mineral specimens and will change once or twice a semester to feature different minerals. The viewing of the gem collection displays at CSU-Pueblo will be free to the public.  However, there is an admission fee to view the gem collection display at the Steelworks Museum.

Since December 2013, Kline has discovered more than 1,000 specimens from topaz to a dark green diopside, which has flakes of gold coloring. Kline has not yet found gold or silver specimens. The sizes of mineral specimens range from a tennis ball to the size of a watermelon. Most of the mineral specimens are from Colorado, while others are from Russia, Finland, Australia and England that were in CSU-Pueblo’s gem collection in the 1980s. Kline will continue to catalog throughout the summer thanks to grant money, storage facilities, gem specimens and collaboration with the Steelworks Museum, CSU-Pueblo, and the Greater Denver Area Gem and Mineral Council.

“This collection is special because it’s starting from the ground up,” Kline said. “By unpacking boxes with gems and then cataloging and numbering the gems, we’ll bring a geology collection interest back to CSU-Pueblo and the Pueblo community.”

For more information on the collection, contact Kline, at sj.kline@pack.csupueblo.edu or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/pages/CSU-Pueblo-Geology-Collection/.