Our collection groups

Rocks and minerals, stuffed animals and naturalised plants, fossils and living creatures, prehistoric, anthropological and ethnological objects make up the naturalist collections. A total of 68 million specimens are stored and assembled in collections, which are themselves gathered into groups. Accompanied by document, archive and art collections, these collections represent around 100 years’ worth of natural history knowledge.

The botany collections include inert collections (over 2,000,000 herbarium sections of cryptogams - fungi and lichens, algae...

This is one of the fastest-growing groups each year thanks to the many oceanographic campaigns. It contains a large number of...

The palaeontology collections of the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle contains between 5 and 6 million specimens and...

The Prehistory collections focuses on archaeological remains, of mineral, animal or vegetable matter, which illustrate the...