he Coronavirus pandemic that spread around the world in the first half of 2020 brought impacts to society that will be registered for an extended period. In this paper, the effects showed an impossibility to maintain the progress of mineral research made by professionals in the academic and scientific areas. In an attempt to find justifications in the legal order of the mineral industry, to continue the work, it was faced with imposing environmental legislation that made a claim even more difficult. It was found that the Mining Code in place no longer regulates the activities of extraction of mineral specimens for museums, educational establishments and other scientific purposes. This left the legal security tied only to the interpretation of legal provisions in articles of the code and its regulation, as well as procedure manuals for environmental inspection bodies, and therefore, subject to the consequences of legal disputes with final decisions in higher courts, given the claim of superiority of the environmental issue over mining. Keywords: Coronavirus, pandemic, environmental legislation, mining code
