On Tuesday, March 3, 2026, at 7:00 p.m., we’ll be having our monthly meeting featuring…
Pseudomorphs
with Scot Krueger, Past BMC President
About the presenter…
Scot Krueger grew up in northeastern Massachusetts as the son of a geologist (former BMC President Hal Krueger) and has been collecting minerals longer than he can remember. Scot earned an undergraduate degree in geology from MIT, and a PhD from Cal Berkeley, before going on to a career as a geologist with the USGS and several oil companies. He retired back to Boston in 2016 and rejoined the BMC after being away for more than three decades. He produced an extensive set of articles for the club’s BMC News newsletter on the Mineral Geology of New England and has done talks that have covered material from several of those articles, along with other topics.
The details…
The meeting will start with some time for socializing, then discussion of club business and welcoming of new members, followed by the talk by Scot.
Scot will talk about Pseudomorphs, or “false forms,” which are minerals that take on shapes that differ from their normal crystal habits due to the influence of other minerals or environmental changes over time. The field of pseudomorphs is widely varied, from minerals that replace other minerals while keeping their shape, to minerals that replace non-mineral materials, to minerals that grow in strange patterns because they grew aligned with other pre-existing minerals, to overgrowths that retain the shape of the host crystal even after it has dissolved, all the way to minerals whose shape is dictated by the space available for them to grow. This talk will discuss the many classes of pseudomorphs, with many images and physical mineral specimens to illustrate their variety.
After the talk, we’ll have the traditional BMC specimen raffle! Buy some tickets for a chance to win!
We hope to see you there!
See the Monthly Meetings page for directions and other information.