Odontoliths

In the vast Padano gulf and in present-day Tuscany, in the wide and humid plains occupied by deep sea bottoms, flocks of mastodons, whales and swordfish grazed.
(Image credits: www.museogeologico.it) 

Il Museo Paleontologico dell’Università di Parma oggi raccoglie due collezioni di odontoliti che testimoniano la ricca fauna ittica Pliocenica del Mar Adriatico e del Mediterraneo: la collezione delle province di Parma e Piacenza e la collezione Lawley.

The Emiliana collection is a large collection that presents great heterogeneity due to the variety of species present and the stratigraphic position of the localities of origin. It includes 175 oldest finds from the Cretaceous "varicolored clays" of the Fornovo, San Vitale Baganza, Faviano, Miano, Mulazzano in the province of Parma and of Vernasca in the province of Piacenza

and more recent finds found in the Miocene and Pliocene sediments of Castell’Arquato, Stramonte, Bacedasco in the province of Piacenza and Maiatico and Tabiano in the province of Parma mainly belonging to cartilaginous fish but partly also to bony fish.

From a historical point of view, this collection has been present since 1859 as reported by Pellegrino Strobel.

The collection was revised, described and illustrated in the first half of the twentieth century by numerous paleontologists such as Sacco (1905) and De Stefano (1912) so it is divided into collections that take the name of the respective scholar. 

The other historic collection is that of Lawley, considered one of the most important Italian collections of ichthyodontolites.

Roberto Lawley was born in Florence in 1818, he was a naturalist passionate about paleontology and collected and classified a large amount of elasmobranch teeth. His writings are numerous, so we have original descriptions and illustrations for many finds.

Most of this collection is kept in the Paleontological Museums of Pisa and Florence, but about sixty artifacts have been donated to the University of Parma and Pellegrino Strobel mentions it among the paleontological heritage of the University's Natural History Museum. 

The specimens are collected on the original 19th century supports and the species, catalog number and area of ​​discovery are indicated on the back.

In the collection there are numerous specimens of teeth of cartilaginous fish (class Chondrichthyes) and bony fish (class Osteichthyes). 

There are also bone fragments, vertebrae, dental plates, scales, otoliths.