In Angers, the collection of the Museum of Natural Sciences includes 100,000 pieces and documents including 50,000 fossils, 20,000 shells and 2,500 birds. The institution occupies the former Comtal Palace (collection of paleontology) as well as the adjoining Demarie Hotel (zoological collection). If the alterations have largely degraded these buildings over the centuries, there remains in particular a pretty circular courtyard as well as an Italian terrace.
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Inside, presented from the reception hall, some naturalized animals, such as an armadillo and a dromedary, await the visitor. We do not know until when since the Museum is not one of the Angevin cultural places whose reopening was announced on June 2. Moreover, it is possible (by reservation by email to animalcrossingaumuseum@outlook.fr) to discover the place remotely. Since April 8, he is indeed one of the first to be mediatized in a fun and educational way via the video game Animal crossing New Horizons available on Nintendo Switch console.
Otherwise, a simple internet connection will be enough to take advantage of the half hour of video tour guided by Benoît Mellier, responsible for the collections of zoology, earth sciences and prehistory. This virtual walk, offered freely, in partnership with Le Figaro, Facebook France and the CLIC.France network, will be online this Friday, May 15 at 6 p.m. and will then be accessible via the museum's Facebook account.
We will learn there for example that the sunfish in front of which the camera lingers was caught in Pouliguen in 1850. Still at the stall of marine wealth we will see that the sturgeon formerly frequented the Loire as reminded by that of 2, 4 m fished in in 1811. At 10 million years upstream we come across, installed at the end of the paleontology room in Anjou, the reconstruction of a Metaxytherium, ancestor of manatees other dugongs. In the genre, it is one of the only realizations in the world to use practically only fossil pieces. Nearby, equally fascinating, giant ammonites from the Secondary Era, fish fossils brought back from the Italian countryside by Bonaparte or a meteorite which fell on Angers in 1822.
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Let's go back in time even further. Up to 92 million years before today. Then, we meet the Vorax plesiosaur, curious marine reptile whose fossil remains also found in the Saumurois allowed a reconstruction on a scale. The room is hung, as was once done for curiosities and wonders, on the ceiling. That of an old study, identical reproduction of the place where the entomologist Gustave Abot (1863-1926) worked.
Little by little, through these various astonishing examples, we become aware of the ever-increasing number of extinct or threatened species. One in three currently summarize the specialists! Such, in the bird room, the American migrating pigeon, the Carolina parakeet or the great penguin. Such, the snow leopard whose specimen is here one of the last acquisitions. Or the Pangolin, which became famous for having participated in the arrival of covi-19 in humans. The one kept here was stuffed in 1798. The notice nearby tells us that we know eight species of the family of mammals Manidae which it belongs. There are four known in Asia and four others in Africa.
And the man in this immense, abundant and old world? Its oldest vestige in all of western France is there: it dates back 43,000 years while its first traces in Anjou date back 600,000 years.
Video accessible this Friday, May 15 from 6 p.m. and then on the Facebook page of the Natural History Museum of Angers as well as on its Instagram account.