Regional Collection Switzerland
The regional collection, which comprises over 100,000 examples, includes fossils and facies objects from Switzerland. They have been arranged according to their age and where they were found.
The Switzerland regional collection is one of the oldest collections at the Natural History Museum Basel. In the past, people mainly collected fossils and less often minerals. To begin with, the area around Basel was searched. The area was then expanded to encompass the whole of the Jura mountains. Today, our collection of fossils from the Jura mountains contains around 75,000 examples, from the Randen in the east to the Vaud Jura in the west.
The collections of fossils and rock samples from the Alps - primarily from the Helvetic region of central Switzerland – and the Central Plateau are significantly smaller.
Worth mentioning are the additional collections of tunnel rocks from the Hauenstein, Weissenstein, Grenchenberg and Axen tunnels.
The collection of Reinhart Gygi, a long-time employee of the Natural History Museum Basel, comprises more than 10,000 fossils and rock samples from over 200 detailed sections dating from the late Jurassic period.
