The palaeobotanical collection of the Swedish Museum of Natural History (Naturhistoriska riksmuseet, NRM) forms part of the museum’s palaeontological collections and contains fossil plants documenting the evolutionary history of vegetation through geological time. The collection comprises more than 300,000 specimens, including over 1,000 type specimens, preserved mainly as impressions, compressions and other plant fossils in sedimentary matrices. Particularly notable are the Carboniferous–Permian floras of China, studied by Thore Halle and published in the monograph Paleozoic Plants from Central Shansi (1927), which include horsetails (sphenopsids), ferns and several groups of fossil gymnosperms. Polar regions are also well represented, with about 25,000 fossils from Spitsbergen, Greenland, Iceland and Bjørnøya, spanning a time interval from the Devonian to the Oligocene. The collection also includes material from several other regions of the world, including Australia and South America, and represents an important resource for studies of plant evolution, palaeoclimate and the history of terrestrial vegetation. Only records originating from South America are represented here.

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