Wyoming's Everywhere At The World-Renowned Tucson Gem and Mineral Show 

TUCSON -- There’s nothing on earth quite like the annual Tucson Gem and Mineral Show in Arizona. That’s because some of the most beautiful pieces of the earth’s natural beauty are on display and for sale, attracting an international audience.

Most gem and mineral shows might occupy a convention center for a weekend or two. The Tucson Gem and Mineral Show stretches across the entire city for two weeks, with hundreds of vendors from dozens of countries showcasing spectacular fossils, minerals, gems, and other artifacts from natural and human history. 

Pieces of Wyoming are everywhere in Tucson and often account for the biggest sales, both in size and price.

“The whole world is here,” said Chris White, a gem dealer who’s attended the Tucson show every year for 30 years. “Business happens here, and it’s a fun community.” 

Open Door Policy

There were over 50 gem show locations during the 2025 Tucson Gem and Mineral Shows. Those locations range from tiny houses to massive tents a quarter of a mile long.

Dealers of all sizes attend the annual show, selling everything from precious gemstones and intricately carved minerals to entire dinosaur skeletons, real and replica, and pieces of petrified wood bigger and heavier than the SUVs parked nearby. 

A wooly mammoth made from scrap metal greeted visitors at the Days Inn by Wyndham Tucson City Center, one of the show’s signature locations. Every room on the first floor was converted into a temporary storefront for fossils, artifacts, and whatever could fit inside. 

Terry Rickers and Joyce Fries were in Room 164, the Dempsey Ridge Room. The walls were adorned with 50-million-year-old fish, freshly caught from the Green River Formation in Kemmerer.

“This room has had fossil fish in it for 20 years,” Rickers said. “This is the largest show of its kind in the world, and there are top-end dealers from around the world.”

A walk outside the Days Inn is a mix of a flea market and an open-air museum. Skulls of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures are around every corner and in tents in the parking lot. Something unexpected lurks inside every darkened room, from three-foot-long Permian reptiles to partial dinosaur skeletons and oceans of fossil fish.

The Saint Petersburg Paleontological Laboratory fit an entire wooly rhinoceros skeleton in Room 124 – one of several Ice Age rhinos in Tucson during the show. The Smoky Mountain Relic Room had everything from ancient coins to vintage firearms, swords, and helmets from the last few centuries of warfare.

Anyone in the market for mammoth ivory could visit Miles of Alaska. Scraps of tusks from mammoths and mastodons ranged from $95 to $250 per pound, with retail and wholesale prices.

Rickers, now retired, is happy to sit inside the Dempsey Ridge Room, striking up conversations, sharing stories, and making a few sales of Green River fish. Visitors range from amateur fossil collectors, museum directors, esteemed scientists, and people who can put as many zeroes on as many checks as they’d like to get the best specimens.

“People will buy everything from single specimens to entire shipping containers of whatever they want to take with them,” he said.

Tucson is a yearly highlight for Rickers. He spends six months excavating near Kemmerer and another six months prepping any fossils he finds. Traveling to Tucson allows him to meet old friends, make new connections, and earn enough to keep going.

“It’s not a life for everybody, but we’re a pretty tight-knit community,” he said. “And there’s so much knowledge here.”

Under The Quarter Mile Tent

The 22nd Street Mineral, Fossil, and Gem Show is one of the biggest venues of the entire show. Several tents were set up in a dirt lot on the east side of Interstate 10, with over 350 vendors inside. 

Visiting 22nd Street was like a world tour. Rocks and minerals of every shape, color, and luster were visible at every turn, optimally lit to show their best qualities.

Opals from Australia, Mexico, and Ethiopia. Large and small gems from Brazil. Oregon sunstones. Jade from India and British Columbia. Onyx from Peru.

If someone wanted a gemstone made from the volcanic dust from the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens, there’s a booth for that. If you want to buy pyrite cubes or quartz spheres by the pound, several vendors are willing to sell in bulk.

If someone found a beryl, tourmaline, or diamond they liked, there were plenty of vendors with rings, necklaces, and other jewelry made of silver and gold to set their stone in. All available, at wholesale and retail prices.

For the more spiritually inclined, there’s a menagerie of frequency rings and “new world gems” with various qualities for wellness and enlightenment. But there are also plenty of stuffed animals of different sizes made of genuine alpaca hair for anyone who wants something on the softer side.

There’s something for everything anyone might be looking for in Tucson.

Chris White, the owner of Superior Gems, was showcasing some sapphires he mined at the Eldorado Bar near Helena, Montana. 

“There’s 25 known sapphire deposits in Montana,” he said. “You get all the qualities at these deposits.”

Some vendors are more reserved, sharing whatever information they want to disclose and forbidding photos of their specimens. Others welcome any and all exposure, provided you don’t forget to tag them when the photo’s posted.

White described the Tucson show as “a fun community” that has kept him and many others coming back year after year for decades. His best exchanges aren’t always financial, as he banters with other dealers about their work and methodologies.

“There’s a love of gemstones here,” he said. “I collect a lot of stuff from a lot of different places, but I always end up back in Tucson.”

Wyoming Everywhere

During the gem and mineral show, significant pieces of Wyoming are everywhere in Tucson. They come in all shapes and sizes, from desktop trinkets to museum centerpieces.

The most common Wyoming specimens are fossils from the Green River Formation, which Rickers called “the fossil fish capital of the world.” Most vendors selling fossils had more than a few fish from the formation excavated in Wyoming or Utah.

More impressive panels contained rarer species of fish, palm fronds, massive turtles, and remarkably intact crocodiles. Anyone with a large blank (and an equally large bank account) could find a perfect space filler in a gigantic slab of Green River rock filled with various fossils—or one enormous specimen.

Gems and minerals from Wyoming are less common but not entirely absent. It’s hard to stand out among the established vendors bringing the best stones from places like China, Madagascar, and Brazil.

Moroccan fossils are also common and remarkable sales pieces in Tucson. Dozens of mosasaurs and other marine reptiles were swimming in the desert city during the show, some as dismembered skulls and teeth and others as fully assembled skeletons ready to stand in a museum exhibit or staged in someone’s living room.  

But, for someone working on a budget, a dinosaur tailbone transformed into a candle holder isn’t a bad place to start. 

Big Sales

After walking between the massive tents and door-to-door booths, a set inside The Co-op, a permanent, air-conditioned facility, is a welcome relief. This is where some of Tucson's most prominent vendors make the biggest sales.

Thomas Lindgren, the president of GeoDécor, was one of the vendors set up in The Co-op. Business in Tucson proved so successful that his company and several others joined forces to establish a permanent presence there.

“We've consistently shown and sold in Tucson for the last 40 years,” he said. “I have a home and prep crews working 12 months a year here. My whole purpose in doing a life's vocation is to advance the knowledge of science to the way that I can afford to do it.” 

Visitors to the Geoworld display room were greeted by a Triceratops skull, a wooly rhinoceros and wooly mammoth skeletons, and a juvenile Allosaurus skeleton found in Washakie County.

Further down the hall, GeoDécor’s display room felt more like a museum than most other vendors. Several mounted dinosaurs and other fossils were arranged like an art gallery behind stanchions. Guides were ready to answer questions and court potential buyers.

The exhibit’s centerpiece was the partial skeleton of a massive sauropod dinosaur excavated from the historic Bone Cabin Quarry near Medicine Bow. Lindgren believes it’s one of the largest, best-preserved specimens ever found.

“When we're finished prepping and mounting it, it will be the largest mounted, articulated dinosaur found anywhere in the world,” he said.

Lindgren might find a buyer for this incredible discovery during the Tucson show, but “big sale” is a relative term that any vendor can attain.

Seth Sorensen, the owner of Fossil Shack, set up shop in a customized shipping container a few blocks from The Co-Op. On the show's first day, he sold a Green River stingray fossil he excavated near Kemmerer.

Sorensen said he found that stingray last summer and finished preparing it two weeks before bringing it and several other fossils to Tucson. Selling a stingray isn’t a bad way to start a show to Sorensen.

“We use what we make in Tucson as the kickstarter each year,” he said. “It gives us that beginning-of-year boost that we need to kick start the rest of the year.”

The sales he makes over the two weeks of the show will help fund further excavations and keep his fossil business from going extinct. He usually makes enough to cover the overhead to keep finding fossils.

“We usually bring several thousand fossils to Tucson,” he said. “We’ll bring 30 to 40 cases of the smaller fossils and another 100 of the larger pieces like the stingray, and we typically sell out of everything. Selling a stingray makes for a good day.”

Unbelievable, Overwhelming, Familiar

There aren’t many places where someone can see the full-sized skull of a mosasaur in a tent and then stroll across the parking lot only to find Ice Age wolf cubs and a wooly rhino foot recovered intact from the Siberian permafrost.

Someone with determination might be able to visit every vendor in Tucson during the show, but it would take a tremendous effort. Many people return to the same vendors yearly, buying obsidian skulls, quartz crystals, and Moroccan trilobites in bulk to sell in gift shops. 

For the vendors, Tucson is more than a show. It’s a reunion.

“We've got a lot of really good friends here from all over the world that we like to meet up with,” Sorensen said. “Fossil and mineral people make a great community. 

Old friends reunite at each other’s booths, exchanging news and leads on potential discoveries. Those conversations could lead to enormously beneficial business pursuits, but it’s all about the moments and atmosphere during the show. 

“It’s a small but tight-knit community,” Rickers said. “Even though it’s worldwide, everybody knows everybody.”

That energy ensures the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show will continue to be busy, astonishing, and lucrative for many years. The prehistoric past offers a lot of profit and potential, and some of the most impressive pieces of that past keep making their way to Tucson.