My name is Ibrahim Jameel and I'm the guy who runs this website. I’m a materials engineer with a degree form the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, but rocks are mt true passion.

 

   I have had an interest in minerals since the fourth grade, when a shiny piece of galena caught my eye.  I ended up spending many hours looking at beautiful specimens online, learning from the postings on the Trinity Minerals, Arkenstone, and Ososoft Minerals websites, the only such websites that existed at the time.

 

  Although I was born in the US, my father is from Pakistan, and on a family trip to the country in 2002 my father was kind enough to give in to my incessant nagging and take me to the North West Frontier Province to buy specimens.  He gave me several hundred dollars to play with, very nice of him considering I was a teenager at the time and he didn't know a thing about what I was buying....

 

In 2003, a few months after the trip, I started this website.  Since then I have returned to Pakistan 4 times, in addition to visiting Peru, Bolivia, Madagascar and India to buy specimens, a list that I hope to expand in the near future.

 

So that's the story behind this site. 

 

Thanks to all the customers who have supported this site over the years, and most of all to my dad for taking time off from his busy corporate job to take me to Tucson every year when I was in high school, and for always helping me in Pakistan where I repeatedly dragged him into unnecessarily dangerous or uncomfortable situations.  It's all quite a bit much for a person who (still) can't tell wulfenite from azurite....

 

This site is based just outside of Chicago, IL.