Museum d'Histoire Naturelle Jacques de La Comble

The Jacques de La Comble Natural History Museum houses more than 800,000 specimens representing all fields of the natural sciences. It holds the world’s largest collection of fossil-bearing nodules from the continental Carboniferous period (160,000 items).

The Autun Natural History Museum traces its origins to the early 19th century. The collections, originally assembled by the Natural History Society and now owned by the City of Autun, are of exceptional quality.
Each year, the temporary exhibitions provide an opportunity to highlight a particular theme from the permanent collections. The Autun Museum holds in its storerooms a collection of taxidermied specimens, including a collection of birds, eggs and nests comprising over 10,000 specimens, as well as insects (over 100,000), herbariums (over 300,000 sheets) containing plants from across Europe and even North Africa, collected as far back as the 19th century.
A vast number of minerals that trace the geological history of the region.
Tens of thousands of fossils representing the animals and plants that lived in our region between 300 and 275 Ma.
The Autun Basin is a global benchmark in the history of the Earth for a period of the Palaeozoic Era. It is referred to as a stratotype. The fossils preserved in the museum’s collections bear witness to this. You will also find a selection from the collections held in storage, covering prehistory in the Autun Basin during the Mousterian (90,000–35,000 years ago) and the Neolithic (5,000 years).
Fossilised animals from the Carboniferous period at Blanzy-Montceau, Les Mines and Le Creusot (300 million years ago). Fossilised flora and fauna from the Autun Basin (295 to 275 million years ago). Energy routes: the history of an industrial sector centred on oil shale, which is used to produce shale oil—equivalent to natural petroleum—as well as coal and autunite, France’s primary uranium ore. Traces of the first Morvan dinosaurs. The characteristic mineral deposits of the Morvan’s mines and quarries, exploited to supply fluorite to the steel and aluminium manufacturing industries.
Animals of the Far North (elk, reindeer, Siberian tiger, silver fox, arctic fox, blue fox, wolverine…)

Currently on display: the ‘Funny Birds’ exhibition

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