Natural History Museum of Lille

The museum is situated in a charming building with typical architecture of the beginning of the 20th century. It takes away the visitors in a surprising travel through continents and tim.

Its collection were brought together by the reunion of five museums: zoological museum, founded in 1822; ethnographical museum, founded in 1850; industrial and commercial museum, founded in 1856; geological museum, founded in 1902; coal museum, founded in 1907.

Ethnographical and industrial collections were deposited in the Natural History Museum in 1990.

Today, the Lille Museum accommodates about 400.000 objects, distributed in four departments: Zoology, Geology, Industry and Ethnography. These collections are of European standards and have important pedagogical, museographic, and scientific value.

Only the zoological and geological collections are presented in permanent exhibition, because the exhibition surface area is small, and the museum needs to undergo restructuration. The other collections are presented during temporary exhibitions.

With its dynamic cultural programme, Lille Museum presents one or two temporary exhibitions each year, on varied topics such as: Oceanian, Amazonian or Chinese civilisations, story of iron, industrial models, biodiversity, wastes, or water.

The permanent exhibition of Zoology illustrates the diversity and fragility of species, and explains important notions such as adaption, ecosystems, systematics and biodiversity.

The permanent geological exhibition recounts a story of 450 millions year, from the Recifal sea of the Devonian period, to the Quaternary period when mammoths lived in Nord-Pas de Calais.

Such diversity of valuable objects within one museum is unrivalled in France, indeed in Europe. So the metropolitan area of Lille would like to transform the natural history museum of Lille into a great Museum of Arts, Sciences and Civilisations.