The Palaeontological collections currently comprise c. 20.000 specimens of plant and animal fossils. The historical suite of Cenozoic fossils collected by Alexander von Nordmann (1803–1866) comprises a large number of scientifically valuable remains of Cave bears, Cave lions, hyaenas collected in the vicinity of Odessa (Ukraine). The collection of fossils from Finland contains microbial remains more than a billion of yeas old and among others a large suite of Palaeozoic (mostly Ordovician) invertebrates from the Åland islands / Ahvenanmaa. Other notable suites are the perissodactyls collected by Ann Forstén (1939–2002) and a representative collection of originals and plaster casts of Cenozoic carnivore collected by Björn Kurtén (1924–1988)
The services of the Paleontological collections are deposition, digitisation and loans of scientific fossil specimens. We provide access to a photo table equipment, Olympus SZX16 (SDFPLAPO 0.5 XPF) and Olympus BX51 (PlanFLN 1.25–50x) microscopes.
The Paleontological collections follows the general collection policy of LUOMUS and the data policy for digitised data.
The specimen loan and short-term visit services are offered free of charge, as is customary among natural history collection institutions.
The digital data is available free of charge Laji.fi (license mostly used CC BY 4.0).
A fee covering the immediate costs of identifications and expert opinions or reports for commercial or non-research purposes is charged. 200 e/hour, minimum 1 hour.
Photography on request based on case-by-case cost calculation.