Welcome to the RBINS Collections
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The Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS), is currently closed due to the coronavirus crisis. Visitors can until further notice unfortunately not be welcomed at the RBINS as the majority of its staff is working from home. Consequently, RBINS can at present also not process loan requests, receive loan returns, until at least mid-May, possibly even longer… More so, data requests that require access to the collections cannot be fulfilled until staff are back at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. We do have remote access to our databases and can provide some assistance with data requests, if these have been entered in our database. Thank you for bearing with us during this difficult time. Kind regards, The Scientific Service of Heritage Team |
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The size of our collections is estimated at 38 million specimens. That collection makes us one of the ten most important natural history collections in the world, as well as the largest in Europe after Paris and London. These collections, which are the result of many decades of exploration and research, help us to better understand the history of life on Earth and biodiversity, and to come up with better ways of protecting the environment. |
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Percentages derived from median of upper and lower range of log scale. Log Scale: 0 = 0 specimens; 1 = 1-10; 2 = 11-100; 3 = 101-1000; 4 = 1001-10000; 5 = 10001-100000; 6 = 100001-1000000; 7= 1000000+ |
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The specimens collections can be roughly divided up into six categories: entomology, recent invertebrates, recent vertebrates, anthropology, palaeontology and geology. RBINS has also a large specialized library and publishes scientific publications which are for many available in Open Access. |
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Percentages derived from median of upper and lower range of log scale. Log Scale: 0 = 0 specimens; 1 = 1-10; 2 = 11-100; 3 = 101-1000; 4 = 1001-10000; 5 = 10001-100000; 6 = 100001-1000000; 7= 1000000+ |
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See also the geographical distribution of the RBINS collections or click on the pictures below for a more detailed overview. |
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