Los Angeles Natural History Museum — The Hixon Ruby Crystal and the LA Gem Collection
Los Angeles Natural History Museum — The Hixon Ruby Crystal and the LA Gem Collection
The principal western US public collection of significant gem and mineral specimens
The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, in Exposition Park, holds one of the principal public gem and mineral collections in the western United States. The Gem and Mineral Hall houses a substantial collection of coloured gemstone specimens, mineral crystals, and meteorites drawn from California sources and from worldwide deposits. The collection's most famous single piece is the Hixon Ruby Crystal — a 196-carat transparent ruby crystal from Mogok, Burma, donated in 1978 — which sits among the largest facet-grade ruby crystals on permanent public display anywhere in the world.
The Hixon Ruby Crystal
The Hixon Ruby is a partially terminated transparent ruby crystal weighing 196 carats, recovered from the Mogok Stone Tract in upper Burma in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. The crystal shows the typical hexagonal habit of corundum and is large enough that, if cut, it would yield several substantial faceted stones. Its preservation as an uncut crystal — rather than its conversion to faceted gems — is part of what makes the specimen exceptional, since rubies of facet-grade quality at 196 carats of uncut weight are essentially never preserved intact.
The crystal was donated to the museum in 1978 by Frederick C. Hixon, a Los Angeles philanthropist, and has been on permanent display since. It is illustrated in standard reference works on Mogok ruby and is one of the most photographed individual ruby specimens in the museum world. The combination of size, transparency, and uncut preservation makes it a textbook reference for what fine Mogok rough looked like at recovery, before the cutting industry converted such material to facet stones.
The wider collection
The Gem and Mineral Hall also includes substantial holdings in California gem materials — particularly the tourmaline of the San Diego County pegmatites at Pala and Mesa Grande, and the kunzite of the same district — alongside coloured stones and mineral crystals from worldwide localities. The collection includes meteorite specimens, a strong selection of California gold specimens reflecting the state's nineteenth-century gold-rush heritage, and minerals from the famous nineteenth- and twentieth-century American mineral districts.
The acquisitions strategy has historically combined donations from California-based collectors and philanthropists with targeted purchases from the international mineral trade, supplemented by exchange and field-collection programmes. The museum's curatorial and research staff publish in the mineralogical and gemmological literature, and the collection is used for academic research as well as for public exhibition.
Position among American gem collections
Within the small group of major American public gem and mineral collections, Los Angeles holds a distinct position. The Smithsonian Institution's National Gem Collection in Washington remains the largest and most comprehensive American collection, with the Hope Diamond and several other named historical stones as its anchors. The American Museum of Natural History in New York holds the Star of India sapphire and the DeLong Star Ruby alongside a substantial coloured-stone collection. The Field Museum in Chicago and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto round out the principal North American institutional holdings.
The Los Angeles collection's particular strengths are the Hixon Ruby, the California gem holdings, and the broader mineral-specimen depth that reflects the western American collecting tradition. The collection is on continuous public display and is one of the principal educational resources for gem and mineral interest on the American west coast.
In the trade
For trade visitors and collectors travelling to Los Angeles, the Natural History Museum's Gem and Mineral Hall is one of the standard educational stops, providing direct visual reference for ruby crystal habit and quality, for Pala-district tourmaline of types now harder to source, and for the broader range of gem and mineral specimens that anchor any serious gemmological education. Skyjems considers museum-collection familiarity an important part of professional development for anyone working seriously with coloured stones, and recommends the LACM gem collection as one of the principal North American references.