Swedish physician, botanist and zoologist Carl von Linné is today famous as the father of binomial nomenclature, a system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts ...

Washington, DC--The first minerals to form in the universe were nanocrystalline diamonds, which condensed from gases ejected when the first generation of stars exploded. Diamonds that crystallize ...

A system of categorization that reflects not just a mineral's chemistry and crystalline structure, but also the physical, chemical, or biological processes by which it formed, would be capable of ...

Minerals are the most durable, information-rich objects we can study to understand our planet's origin and evolution. However, the current classification system leaves unanswered questions for ...

Minerals are physical objects, rooted in time and formed through complex planetary processes. So why don’t scientists classify them that way? A philosopher and two Earth scientists recently asked that ...

Quartz, diamond, calcite, and pyrite are a few of the most famous mineral “species,” according to traditional systems of classification. Yet, two papers published in American Mineralogist have ...

Of the more than 5,000 minerals recognized by geologists, fewer than 100 are thought to constitute 99 percent of the Earth’s crust. Much more than that—over half of all known minerals, in fact—are ...

The impact of Earth’s geology on life is easy to see, with organisms adapting to environments as different as deserts, mountains, forests, and oceans. The full impact of life on geology, however, can ...

Mineral Monday is a weekly video series exploring the many amazing minerals, fossils, and historic objects on display at the W.M. Keck Earth Science and Mineral Engineering Museum as told by museum ...