Cockburn Museum of Geology
Cockburn Museum of Geology
The total holding of the museum exceeds 130,000 specimens and other materials. The last full inventory of all categories of material gave the following numbers of articles:
| Special (donated) Museum Collections | 30,000 | Research Collections | 60,000 |
| Teaching Collections specimens | 10,000 | Thin Sections | 7,000 |
| Economic Collections | 3,000 | Exam. Collections | 10,000 |
| Sedimentary Collections | 3,000 | Map Collections | 3,000 |
| Transparency Collection | 4,000 |
The Cockburn Museum's very extensive collection of geological specimens and historical objects reflects Edinburgh's prominent position in geological sciences since the time of James Hutton (1726-1797) and its continuing activity today. The stored collections reflect the whole spectrum of Earth Science materials - minerals, rocks, fossils - as well as maps and photographs and archives of activity by famous Earth scientists dating back as far as the late eighteenth century.
The collections have been housed at the Grant Institute since its opening in 1932 and were largely catalogued and arranged during the early years of the Institute by Dr. A. M. Cockburn. The considerable care, dedication and effort undertaken by Dr Cockburn on a voluntary basis automatically led his colleagues to adopt his name for the museum following his death in 1959. Since 1960, Helen Nisbet and Peder Aspen have been curators of the Cockburn Museum and have played a major part in extending the teaching and research collections in association with the huge expansion in both undergraduate and graduate students in geology in the second half of the twentieth century.