Does anyone here collect fossils, minerals, rocks, insects or anything else pertaining to natural history.

I have a modest fossil and mineral collection that I started about 15 to 20 years ago.  It is mostly pretty commonplace stuff.  Trilobites, amonites, desert roses and such.  But I do have a small fossil fish.  Also I just recently purchased a genuine metorite fragment and an awesome cast of a Keichousaurus hui.  The K. hui cast cost a mere fraction of what the genuine article would have, is to my eye just as good and as a benefit I don't have to feel guilty that my specimen rightly belongs in a museum for the benefit of all.  These last two acquisitions came from a store called "Darwin's World" found in the most unlikeliest of places, small town USA.  It is in New Hope, PA for those of you who may be nearby but he does not have a website yet.  Perhaps what most impressed me about this store (being the sceptical atheist that I am) is that I did not have to wade through a gamut of the virtues of the healing powers of crystals etc. but rather that they were there just to be admired for their intrinsic beauty. 

I had to purchase nearly all of my fossil/mineral collection.  There isn't a whole lot of fossils or interesting minerals just laying around where I live, or maybe I am just as good at fossil collecting as I am at chess.  However I do have some large fossil scallops that I dug out of Calvert Cliffs before I learned that it was actually illegal  to do so.

Recently I also bought some "natural art" which were framed butterflies and insects to hang on my wall.  They are exquisite.  I will eventually show picts of my collections but don't hold your breath since I don't possess the "techy" gene.  I always wanted to start an insect collection of my own when I was a kid but I felt bad about killing the insects.  Many if not all of the ones that I bought are native to exotic locales like rainforests but supposedly many of these insects are farmed specifically for this.  I finally convinced myself to do it since 1)  insects reproduce and grow very rapidly, so my collection should not noticably damage their population and 2)  there is a cost to popularizing nature, which though may sometimes be higher than we would like is likely to be far lower than if virtually no body knew about the rich diversity of plants and animals that existed in the world at large and so consequently would not be interested in maintaining that diversity and heritage for future generations. 

If my reasoning is flawed I still hope to enjoy my bug collection anyway.

cheers

I don't collect any of these things myself, but might one day start. For now I'm just content to collect interesting information on (and hopefully a little understanding about) the natural world inside my head.