Located at the Geological Survey of Canada office in Ottawa, Logan Hall is open to visitors, Monday to Friday between 08:00 and 16:00. For further information please contact the Earth Sciences Information Centre.

Logan Hall is named for Sir William Edmond Logan, the founder in 1842 of the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) and its first director. Many of the exhibits in Logan Hall draw on GSC's vast national collections of rocks, minerals, fossils, meteorites and ores. Interactive displays and videos will test your knowledge of geology and teach you how to pan for gold. The "Wall of Fame" will introduce you to some of the many men and women whose work with the Geological Survey has made a difference to the way we understand the world. Historical displays show how geology has been carried out in Canada from its earliest days.

On the left as you enter Logan Hall is the Fossils of Canada display. The first three window cases contain fossils of bacteria, plants, and invertebrate and vertebrate animals.

The fourth window case has fossils of historical interest. For example, the trilobite was collected by Logan during his first GSC field excursion to Percé, Quebec, in 1843. On the shelf below is a specimen that was the centre of a heated debate over a century ago. The discovery of Eozoon canadense, or the so called "Dawn Animal of Canada", was announced by Logan in 1859 -- the same year that Charles Darwin published his revolutionary theory of evolution that caused such controversy on the origins and antiquity of life. Found in Precambrian rocks (making it more than 570 million years old), Eozoon canadense suggested to Logan and others that life on Earth began much earlier than was thought at the time. Eozoon canadense was later determined not to be a fossil, but similarly banded stromatolite fossils, an example of which is on the same shelf, are now known from Precambrian rocks as old as 3.4 billion years.

Against the east wall of Logan Hall, you will see William Logan himself sitting in front of his tent on a beach, in the Gaspésie region of Quebec, recording his day's work in a field notebook. The large wheel behind him is an odometer, which he used to measure distances. The landscape in the background is based on one of his own sketches.

Elevator fronts on the 2nd to 7th floors of the GSC, 601 Booth Street, wall panels, and drinking fountain niches are made from Laredo-Chiaro, a cream-coloured marble containing many veinlets filled with white calcite. This stone is quarried in Italy. The elevator lobby, part of Logan Hall, and solid piers or columns are faced witha marble breccia from Italy called the Breche Levant. This stone is composed of white, grey, light and dark brown fragments varying in size from 60 mm to 5 cm in diameter. The floors of Logan Hall are Terazzo.

The highly decorative serpentine breccia used on elevator fronts and in the four columns in the centre of Logan Hall is called Monte Verde and is quarried in Vermont. It is mottled green with shades of light and dark green, interspersed with veinlets and small blobs of quartz.

A pink crystalline limestone or marble from Tennessee, called Endsley Pink, is used for floors in the elevator lobby, and for stair treads. It is also used as drinking fountain floor slabs. This rock is mainly a pink, medium grained marble with faint bands of white, pink, and grey running through it.

Black marble base boards are made from Vermont bioclastic limestone.