Orlov Paleontological Museum (Moscow)

 fossil museum  Add category

 Upload a photo

www.paleo.ru/museum-en/

The Orlov Paleontological Museum is a part of the Paleontological Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences. It is named after Academician Yuri Alexandrovich Orlov. The museum represents one of the oldest natural-science institutions in Russia. Its history goes back to the first public museum in our country – the “Kunstkammer” founded by Peter the Great. The modern exposition is based on rich scientific collections of the Paleontological Institute. It includes about five and a half thousand natural paleontological objects. The museum is housed in a specially constructed building with original architecture and unique, monumental and decorative design. Paleontological Museum is one of a kind cultural landmark of Moscow and Russia in general. It is one of the most representative paleontological museum collections around the world. Every year it is visited by over 200 000 people and about half of them are children of school and preschool age.

The museum exposition occupies five main halls. Connected by crossings, they form a closed sequence, which begins and ends by a tower with a ceramic panel "Tree of Life". It is the biggest art decoration of the museum. All halls of the museum, except for the introductory one, are devoted to particular eras of geologic history of the Earth. The introductory hall is followed by the hall of Precambrian and Early Paleozoic, and then, by turns, halls of the Late Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic. The exposition of the museum allows to trace all main stages of life evolution on the Earth: from the fossil evidences of vital activity of the earliest bacteria aged as about 1,5 billion years, to the animals of Ice Age, the contemporaries of the ancient man.

Paleontological Museum was opened in 1987 at the south-west of Moscow.