Odessa Paleontological Museum

[Вивьен]

A week ago I visited our paleontological museum, Honestly, was impressed. Here's a brief prehistory, at the end of the photos that I managed to do.
It all started with the fact that once cavers discovered near Odessa, more than a dozen caves, the largest of which is longer than a kilometer. Their origin remains largely a mystery.

    The puzzle is that they found an enormous accumulation of animal bones. This kind of burial of the bones were found by accident. It happened in 1928 when cavers explored the underground labyrinth of catacombs, located near Odessa, resulting from human activities after the extraction of stone-limestone in the old part of town (district Moldavian).

Who discovered the burial ground was a young and energetic TG Gritsay Cheka, which later on for several decades so carried away by the secret caves that became the head of excavations in the caves. He then brought the samples of bones known to scientists. Among the bones found in caves, but bones of predators, there were bones and teeth of young Auvergne mastodons, camels, pikas, gazelle, badger, mole rats, rabbits, hamsters, voles, mice, ostrich, poultry, similar to the Indian marabou, birds, close to loon, partridges, etc., are especially numerous bones of camels ...

Odessa Paleontological Museum is one of the oldest in Ukraine. In 1865, simultaneously with the establishment of the Novorossiysk University, was opened geological study, which had paleontological department with 318 exhibits. In 1873, an outstanding zoologist and paleontologist Vladimir Kovalevsky gave the first great author's collection of fossils of freshwater mollusks south of France. Since then, paleontological museum existed as an independent unit.

Paleontological Museum is one of the ten best paleontological museums in the world.

The museum contains the richest regional collection of fossils collected in the South Eastern European Platform (Ukraine and Moldova), and unique collection of fossil fauna and flora, which are absent in many other paleontological museums in the world.
Its rooms are kept confirming Earth's past - two marine dinosaur, fish, reptile, dinosaur egg, tooth and claw, presented to graduates of the University.

Exhibit Paleontological Museum located in three halls of the total area of 500 sq.m. The museum's collections comprise more than 60 thousand exhibits. The museum's library has more than 10 thousand items, most of whom are founders of paleontology and geology.
The most important collections in the museum are seven complete skeletons of vertebrate animals that lived in our region. This mastodon skeletons, three-toed horses, rhinoceros, pollard, Pliocene camels, elephants, cave bear, mammoth.
Are of great value skeletons Mosasaurus, ichthyosaur, a full skeleton of sea lilies and a unique skeleton dinornisa.

At the museum there is an underground paleontological reserve - burial of extinct vertebrates, which occupy a room paleontological museum. These are representatives of mammals from the limestone karst caves pontical city of Odessa. The exhibition "Fauna Odessa catacombs" is the remains of camels, foxes, hyenas, mastodons, ground squirrels, badgers, marabou, ostrich and other representatives of Pliocene age.