Lloyd Gunther and his famous rock collection

Brigham City resident Lloyd Gunther's academic training and career was in the field of Wildlife Management. During his World War II military service, he fought malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Later he worked in wildlife refuges in several states and was Manager of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. His lifelong hobby has been collecting rocks and minerals, an interest shared with his family. He has donated parts of his extensive collection to various universities and agencies, including Brigham City Corporation. In a 2006 oral history interview, he said:

I was drafted into the Army in World War II and was assigned to a Malaria Control and Survey Unit. So although I carried a rifle, my real enemy was the mosquito which carried malaria. My primary job was to protect our troops from malaria – first in the Solomon Islands and later in the Philippines.

I was assigned to the Navy for a couple of weeks to collect birds harboring mites that carried a tropical fever commonly called scrub typhus fever. I went into the jungle and collected the birds. I wounded a cockatoo, and it gave a distress call. All the birds from the area gathered in response to the call, so I collected quite a variety of birds. After my parasitologist collected the mites from the birds, I saved the skins and sent them to the Chicago Field Museum.

Then I used to go out in the jungle and find a bleeding vine hanging from the trees. I would jerk the vine, and it would just rain beetles, big rhinoceros beetles, walking sticks, and things like that. I sent those to the Smithsonian, the University of Utah and so on. I had a little scientific background, so I wanted to preserve these specimens that I'd collected.

Fossil and mineral collecting was always a family hobby. Whenever we had a spare day or a holiday, we would go collecting. We collected all over Box Elder County. When we lived in New Mexico, we collected there. I have collected in Germany, in France, in England. I have taken one of the directors of the British Museum collecting fossils down in the House Range in Utah, and he has taken me collecting along the White Cliffs of Dover. I've traded with the British Museum.

My interest in collecting began when I was a teenager, John Hutchings from Lehi's Hutchings Museum, was my mentor when I was a teen-aged boy. He took me collecting down in Utah Lake. In the drought period of 1943 – 45, Utah Lake almost dried up. Where the Provo River emptied into the Lake was an ancient Indian campsite. We dug down to a charcoal layer a few inches below the surface and collected hundreds of arrow points, spears, pipes, drills, knives – all kinds of artifacts. I later gave the major part of this collection to the University of Utah

Over 70 years of collecting, our family has amassed over 100,000 specimens besides what we have donated. When I first moved back here to Brigham City, we went collecting up on the mountain, and I found a strange fossil. I didn't know what it was. I took it to the University of Utah, and a professor there was intrigued by it. He came up, and we found several more. At that time that there was a student doing his post-doctorate at Harvard and was studying a related group of fossils. We sent the specimens to him, and he described this first fossil that we found. We didn't know it at the time, but he named it in our honor. It's called Gogia guntheri. It was the first fossil that was described in our honor. Since that time we have had over a dozen named in our family's honor.
My life expectancy is long gone past so I want, while I'm living, to see that this collection of 70 years is available for people to enjoy.

I love it when we get kids coming to see our collection. We tell them rocks can talk.

They say, “No way!”

We show them that rocks can talk and tell us a lot. We go up Sardine Canyon here to find coral that dates back to 300 million years ago when there was a great coral reef there. Well, coral lives in warm water. We don't find coral in cold-water habitat, so we know that 300 million years ago this was a warm tropical climate. I tell them that is just one of the many things we can learn from rocks.

Kathy Bradford