Museu de les Ciències Naturals de Barcelona
Benchmark exhibition "Planeta Vida"
Geology
Banded Sandstone. The action of erosion and sedimentation due to the wind can create specimens that appear to be the work of human hands.
Made of hexagonal crystals of intense green and unusual size, this specimen is one of the museum's most valuable minerals.
A fossil mollusc that is a unique piece of the great Baron palaeontology collection [Paris], acquired in 1891 to form part of the initial patrimony of the Martorell Museum.
This is an extraordinary mineral due to the size and quality of the crystal, and this specimen shows unusual transparency.
Fossilized gingko leaves. This tree is considered to be a living fossil, as it still grows in many places on the planet.
This rock, with alternating bands of silicates and iron oxides, is one of the oldest witnesses to the presence of life on Earth.
This is the museum's most emblematic fossil vertebrate, the first crocodile discovered from the lower Cretaceous in Europe.
Botany
Cephalaria fragosoana. This plant was collected by Dr. Pius Font i Quer, the founder of the first botanic garden of Barcelona, and comes from his early expeditions to Morocco in the 1930s.
The yellow structure, the aril of this seed, attracts birds, which eat the seed and disperse it, thereby making up for the plant's lack of mobility.
Enjoy the diversity of the fungi of Catalonia, thanks to the process of lyophilization [freeze-drying] that preserves them permanently as if they were in their natural habitat.
Zoology
Prognatodon. One of the two only replica in the world of this marine lizard that lived eighty million years ago in Colorado [USA].
The appearance of the individuals of the same species can vary greatly between juveniles and adults. Discover how Sula bassana changes until it reaches adulthood.
You can see this seaweed, which is, of course, normally found in the sea, and discover the hidden world of these organisms that share characteristics with both plants and microbes.
These organisms are invisible to the naked eye, but the museum has created stabilized colonies of microbes that allow them to be seen and easily distinguished.
The little Ildobates neboti, the icon of biospeleology, which was described as a species by Professor Francesc Español, director of the former Museum of Zoology from 1966 to 1977.
Replica of the skeleton of a hominid of the species Australopithecus afarensis found in 1974 in Ethiopia, which dated the appearance of bipedal gait to approximately 3.2 million years ago.
