Museum d'Histoire Naturelle Jacques de La Comble

The Jacques de La Comble Natural History Museum collects more than 800,000 samples representing specimens from all fields of natural science. It holds the world's first collection of fossiliferous nodules from the continental Carboniferous (160,000 pieces). The Autun Natural History Museum originated in the early 19th century. The collections, which were built up by the Natural History Society and are now owned by the City of Autun, are of exceptional quality. The temporary exhibitions are each year an opportunity to highlight one of the themes present in the permanent collections. The Autun Museum's reserves contain naturalized specimens, including a collection of birds, eggs and nests representing more than 10,000 specimens, as well as insects (more than 100,000). Herbariums (more than 300,000 plates) containing plants from all over Europe and even from North Africa, collected since the 19th century. Numerous 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 world reference in the history of the Earth for a period of the primary era. It is known as a stratotype. The fossils conserved in the museum's collections are evidence of this. You will also find a sample of the collections in reserve on prehistory in the Autun basin during the Mousterian (90,000-35,000 years) and Neolithic (5,000 years) periods. Fossil animals from the Carboniferous of Blanzy-Montceau les Mines-Le Creusot (300 million years) Fossil flora and fauna of the Autun basin (295 to 275 million years)
The energy routes, history of an industrial sector: this is organised around oil shales allowing the production of shale oil, equivalent to natural oil, coal and autunite, the first French uranium mineral. Traces of the first Morvan dinosaurs The characteristic mineralizations of the mines and quarries of the Morvan, exploited to supply the steel and aluminium manufacturing industries with fluorite.
The animals of the Great North (elk, reindeer, Siberian tiger, silver fox, white fox, blue fox, wolverine, etc.)
The ornithology room with the exhibition "The Art of Being a Bird

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