The Department of Palaeontology at the Natural History Museum houses one of the largest and most comprehensive fossil collections in the world, with approximately nine million specimens documenting more than 3.5 billion years of the history of life on Earth. The collection includes fossil invertebrates, fossil vertebrates and microfossils, as well as extensive holdings of ichnofossils, fossil plants and type specimens. It brings together fossils of great scientific and historical value, collected since the eighteenth century and originating from pioneering geological surveys and natural history expeditions. Part of the collection has been digitised and made available online, with ongoing efforts to expand and improve data quality. Only records originating from South America are represented here.

Conditions for using the data

The Natural History Museum is committed to the principles of Open Access and Open Science, promoting open access to its research and data. To this end, it has launched the Data Portal (https://data.nhm.ac.uk), which makes its research and collections datasets available online, allowing anyone to explore, download and reuse the information for their own studies.

How to cite

Cite according to the guidelines of the Natural History Museum Data Portal (https://data.nhm.ac.uk/about/citation), including the dataset identifier and the date of access.

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