Paleontology and Geology Collections

Our community, colleagues, and facilities underpin our ability to decipher the evolution of our planet. For example, our 300+ departmental volunteers anchor activities in our fossil preparation, petrography, and digital imaging labs, support field investigations, and provide indispensable support to our collections staff to curate new specimens into the state-of-the-art Avenir Collection Center. We’re also surrounded by many collegial science partners and are adjacent to well-exposed rocks spanning much of Earth history. Utilizing these resources, our team conducts research all over the world and in our backyard, while authoring a diverse array of academic and popular publications, and building world-class earth sciences collections. In concert with these efforts, we work closely with the Museum’s Experiences and Partnerships teams to convey the utility and wonder of earth sciences to the community, and to mentor the next generation, through exhibits and programs.

Our collections are anchored by diverse minerals from historic mining districts, regionally relevant building stones, K-Pg boundary strata from around the world, Colorado gold, and one of the largest museum collections of diamonds. Many of our most iconic specimens are on display in Coors Hall of Gems & Minerals.

Our meteorite collection, anchored by the early work of Harvey Nininger, includes specimens from all over the world, including many sighted falls from Colorado and the American West. We also have a diverse collection of tektites, K-Pg boundary impact rocks, and meteorite-related samples. 

Plants are the basis of all terrestrial ecosystems and have been so since they first colonized land more than 400 million years ago. The paleobotany collections at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science are composed of fossilized plant remains spanning the history of plant life on land. The collection is focused on the Rocky Mountain and Great Plains regions, arguably the most prolific fossil plant-producing regions in the world. The collection is one of the four largest and best curated collections from this region of Late Cretaceous and Paleogene age. Fossil plant specimens include compression and impression fossils on stone matrix, petrified trunks and stems, palynological slides, and bulk samples and residues.

Fossil plants are abundant in Colorado. We hold more than 30,000 specimens from Late Cretaceous, Early Paleocene, and Early Eocene strata from the state collected at over 600 salvage sites and natural outcrops since 1991. This collection includes the 64 Ma Castle Rock Rainforest, which numbers nearly 10,000 specimens and represents the oldest known tropical rainforest, and the West Bijou collection, a suite of about 5,000 specimens that tells the story of forest recovery following the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Our invertebrate fossil collections span the globe and are anchored by Eocene insects, Cretaceous mollusks, and Cambrian trilobites from the American West.

Geographically, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science vertebrate paleontology collection primarily originates from the Rocky Mountain region; however, we also have world-class fossil vertebrate collections from Madagascar and other parts of the globe. In the framework of geologic time, our collection consists predominantly of Cenozoic mammals, Jurassic and Cretaceous dinosaurs, and Cretaceous seaway fishes and reptiles. The collection has now grown to almost 300,000 cataloged specimens, more than 280,000 of which have been collected from the Rocky Mountain Region since 1988; the majority of them are of fossil mammals. This significant growth has been accomplished using modern geological and paleontological field techniques as well as acquisition of established, catalogued collections. As a result, the collections are extremely well documented and of high value in addressing contemporary research questions related to the history of life, evolution, paleobiogeography, paleoclimate, and paleoecology.

The collection is divided into (1) exhibit specimens targeted at the museum visitor in Prehistoric Journey and elsewhere in the Museum and (2) research collections that are used by Museum scientists as well as visiting researchers and students from around the world. Specimens related to ongoing research projects are currently being collected from the Morrison Formation of Colorado; the Kaiparowits and Wahweap formations of Utah; the Fruitland and Kirtland formations of New Mexico; the Hell Creek and Fort Union formations of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana; the Lance Creek Formation of Wyoming; the Laramie and Denver formations of Colorado; the Wind River, Willwood, and Bridger formations of Wyoming; the Maevarano Formation of Madagascar; and various Paleogene and Neogene localities in Colorado. Since 1988, more than 500 books, scientific papers, abstracts, and popular articles have been published on the Museum’s vertebrate fossil collections. The collection includes many complete and extraordinarily well-preserved skeletons and preserves 74 holotypes, which serve as the morphological standards for various species. It also contains several institutional icons, including the skeletons of the plesiosaur Thalassomedon and several dinosaurs such as Diplodocus, Allosaurus, Stegosaurus (Colorado’s state fossil), and Torosaurus as well as several large mammals such as Megacerops, Amebelodon phippsi, and Mammut (mastodon).