Out of 92, I will eliminate 20 because there are NO minerals that contain essential contents of these. Another way to look at this is to say the ideal formula, as we may find in (Back, 2018) does not include a given element. Among the pesky 20, I will include the
noble gases. They are helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon and radon. The rest are [by symbols] Ac, At, Eu, Fr, Ho, Lu, Pa, Pm, Po,Pr, Tb, Tc, Tm and Ra. So, that’s the ones we don’t care about for now.
If you bear with me, we might also decide to pay little attention to 24 more elements because they have 35 or less species each using, again, their ideal formula to determine who makes the cut.

Follow along on the periodic table as this list is in order from top to bottom.
21 – scandium has 18 minerals.
31 – gallium has 7 minerals.
32 – germanium has 33 minerals.
35 – bromine has 12 minerals.
37 – rubidium has 3 minerals.
44 –ruthenium has 8 minerals.
45 – rhodium has 15 minerals.
48 – cadmium has 27 minerals.
49 – indium has 14 minerals.
53 – iodine has 28 minerals.
55 – cesium has 24 minerals.
60 – neodymium has 28 minerals.
62 – samarium has 2 minerals.
64 – gadolinium has only 1 mineral.
66 – dysprosium is a problem, it may have one or possibly none!
68 – erbium has only 1 mineral.
70 – ytterbium has 5 minerals.
72 – hafnium has only 1 mineral.
75 – rhenium has 2 minerals.
76 – osmium has 7 minerals.
77 – iridium has18 minerals.
78 – platinum has32 minerals.
79 – gold has 33 minerals.
Finally, 90-thorium has 35 minerals.

So, you can collect these but I have decided to focus
elsewhere as I want to go where we can at least hope to find a specimen available.
Let's go to the other end of the spectrum and look at the group I call the Big Eight. They are the most common elements in the earth’s crust and have lots of minerals that are fun to study. The list of eight includes oxygen, silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, sodium, potassium and magnesium. Many of these have more than 1,000 minerals [again based on the ideal formula] and we might make a special note of oxygen with over 4,000;
silicon has over 1,500. Believe it or not, hydrogen has over 3,000 and isn’t even that common in the earth’s crust. It ranks tenth overall. One source says that the Big Eight make up 99.9 % of the crust.
One way we see minerals grouped is according to chemical groups. Using a somewhat arbitrary list of 17 main groups, I have found that 13 contain oxygen. The other four are native elements, sulfides, sulfosalts and halides. Among the rest, 12 groups are based on radicals that have oxygen such as carbonate. They also contain carbon too. The Rock-forming minerals may account for over 200 species and most of them are silicates.
Here is one example for you to consider. Uranium, number 92, is an element where you might think there are few choices for a collector. Well, it turns out that there are nearly 300 species. that is a bit odd considering the fact that uranium is 50th in terms of rarity in the crust. Further, only 19 elements have more species than uranium. A common example is the species uraninite which may be sold as pitchblende. Autunite and torbernite are a couple of others. We also notice a lot of species may have a little uranium present but again not in the ideal formula. Zircons with this property are called cyrtolites and we see them in pegmatites now and then. Also, certain minerals that are U-rich may also have a little Th, Ra, Pb, and Po present. Beryllium has only about 125 minerals yet it is slightly more common than uranium in the crust; it ranks 44th . The
number of species has little to do with the rarity or lack thereof for a given element. Compare arsenic that ranks 47th and has over 600 species.

This series will present short articles telling you a bit more about each element and its minerals.

- Bill Shelton