Collections

Currently, our collection consists of over 500 type specimens and over 90,000 individual vertebrate, invertebrate, and plant fossils which are organized by geologic period and locality. Below are some of our featured collections (which actually represent a small part of our holdings) with type specimens and additional information.

Our Museum also has a wide variety of specimens not assigned to a particular collection. They are organized by taxon.

Vertebrates

Invertebrates

Plants

Additionally, you may search for a particular fossil in our database:

Burgess Shale Collection (Middle Cambrian)

A rare Middle Cambrian collection acquired from the Smithsonian Institution. The Burgess Shale is one of the most significant fossil deposits in the world, containing the remains of a previously unknown diversity of soft-bodied marine invertebrates from British Columbia, Canada.

Bear Gulch Limestone Fauna (Mississippian)

Contains soft-bodied taxa such as worms, starfish, shrimp, brachiopods, starfish, conodont-bearing animals from central Montana. This collection also contains one of the most diverse collections of Carboniferous fish in the world.

Deiss Collection (Cambrian)

The Deiss collection consists of mostly trilobites and some brachiopods from Montana, Wyoming and adjacent areas of the West. It includes the casts of many trilobite type specimens.

Fields Collection (Tertiary)

This is the most extensive Tertiary mammal collection in the Wyoming-Montana-Idaho region, especially for the Miocene. It contains a wealth of mammal fossils of the Rocky Mountain region.

Silberling-Muller Collection (Triassic)

A collection of Triassic sponges and corals and other marine invertebrates from west-central Nevada, collected as early as the 1930's.

Fenton Collection (Precambrian)

The Fenton specimens are primarily fossil algae stromatolites from Montana.

Stanley Collection (Triassic)

Extensive collection of Upper Triassic fossils from alpine Europe. Includes sponges, corals, hydrozoans, brachiopods, and mollusks from the Cordillera of western North America and Canada (including Alaska). Collection also contains silicified Triassic invertebrates from the Andes of Peru and central Europe.

Bearpaw Shale Fossils (Cretaceous)

This collection contains well-preserved and rare crustaceans, cephalopods and bivalves from western and central Montana, many of which are preserved in nodules.

Miller Botanical Collection

Early Cretaceous and Cenozoic flora, mostly from Montana, Pinacea