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The natural history museum of Luxembourg curates scientific collections in both the life and earth sciences. It preserves a number of historically valuable specimens as well as holo- and paratypes. Approximately three quarters of the objects originate from Lorraine, Luxembourg, Rhineland-Palatinate, the Saarland and Wallonia. The Museum’s collection is therefore one of the most important natural history collection in the Greater Region (Lorraine-FR, Saarland-DE, Rheinland-Pfalz-DE and Wallonie-BE). The Luxembourg natural history museum holds one of the most important collections in the Greater region on a radius of about 150 km around Luxembourg. Some of the oldest specimens in the Museum’s natural history collections date back to the beginning of the 19th century and are therefore of great historical value. For example, an exsiccata collection of François Auguste Tinant (1803-1853), established to illustrate the flora of Luxembourg, has been conserved in its original form.
The herbarium consists of approximately 100.000 specimens, about half of which are digitized. It holds the collection of ascomycetes and basidiomycetes with some 350 types of fungal species described by Feltgen in his ‘Vorstudien zu einer Pilz-Flora des Grossherzogthums Luxemburg’ (1899-1905). The major part of the herbarium of Hugo Ilse with several thousand specimens from Thuringia is also hosted in Luxembourg. The Herbarium of J. Mangen collected in the 1980’s from Mt. Trikora in New Guinea, Indonesia counts over 1100 specimens.
The MnhnL curates the important historical fossil collection of Edmond Pellat (1832-1907), mostly Jurassic invertebrates from France, as a permanent loan. The Pellat collection comprises currently 12.000 registered fossils, an estimated 3.000-4.000 fossils awaiting their registration.
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