Paris, the Museum national : Collections of birds and mammals

Both a scientific establishment and a public service, applying itself to research and the dissemination of knowledge, the Museum has five main founding objectives which govern and nourish all of its activities.
A fantastic memory of living beings and minerals
The management and conservation of the collections is one the central pillars in the Museum's statutory activities.
The museum exercises a major patrimonial function - to acquire, conserve, restore, manage and exhibit very important national collections of documents and natural history: collections of living organisms, inert collections and databases. The Museum is therefore, along with its counterparts in London and Washington, the richest source of collections in the world.
The inert object collections of palaeontology, geology, mineralogy, meteorites, botany, zoology, prehistory, anthropology, ethnobiology and chemistry are estimated to total over 60 million specimens.