Zoological Museum of St. Petersburg

Main excursions

Sightseeing tour of the Museum

Brief history of the Museum.
Origin of collections, major zoological expeditions. During the excursion, visitors get acquainted with the most interesting biogroups, collections, and individual exhibits. languages: Russian, English
Modern theory of evolution

The life and teachings of Charles Darwin.

Development of evolutionary ideas in the pre-Darwinian and post-Darwinian periods. Modern evolutionary trends. Animals of various natural zones

Excursions are conducted on the basis of biogroups representing animals in their natural habitat.

Tourists can not only imagine reptiles, mammals and birds of various landscapes, but also appreciate their unique adaptability to life in various, often completely unfavorable conditions. Official Website Tours

in the Museum:

FISH COLLECTION

Fish include aquatic cranial vertebrates characterized by the presence of gills throughout the entire life cycle and paired limbs (when they exist) in the form of fins.

Based on this definition, jawless animals are also included by many researchers in the concept of “fish”. Fishes and fish-like animals belong to the phylum Chordata and the subphylum Craniata, i.e. to the group of the most highly organized animals, but occupy a lower position in it than other representatives of this subtype (amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals). AMPHIBIAN COLLECTION

On the right side of the second hall, immediately behind the fish collection, there is a small section dedicated to amphibians, in which you can see more than a hundred different species of these animals.

Amphibians, or amphibians, are the first vertebrates to emerge from water onto land. They apparently originated from ancient lobe-finned fish and retained a significant connection with water. In most amphibians, eggs can only develop in water, and the larvae lead an aquatic lifestyle. Amphibians appeared on Earth no less than 350 million years ago, and reached their heyday about 300 million years ago, when a humid and warm climate dominated large areas of the planet, and even more highly organized terrestrial vertebrates did not exist. MARINE COMMUNITIES

In nature, living creatures are not found in the order in which they are arranged on the shelves of a systematic collection.

They form communities in which representatives of all groups of animals and plants, where they exist, are found mixed together. Since most types of invertebrates are represented in the marine fauna, and many are found only in the sea, marine communities were chosen to illustrate the diversity of invertebrate living conditions in this section of the exhibition. They are placed so that following along the right central passage of the second hall you can make an underwater journey from the Arctic to the Antarctic, passing the tropics along the way. The objects here are selected to cover as fully as possible the diversity of living conditions at sea. BIRDS COLLECTION

Birds occupy part of the 2nd hall, next to the reptile department.

In no museum in the world will you see all modern birds - there are more than 8.5 thousand species. However, the collection of birds in our museum is larger in terms of the number of species and the total number of exhibits than in any other. The main phylogenetic branches of the class of birds - orders, suborders and superfamilies - are most fully represented in the systematic part of the ornithological collection. Stuffed birds only in the systematic department are more than 3.5 thousand specimens (about 2.5 thousand species), and the total number of exhibits related to birds in the museum is 4768. As in all other exhibitions of our museum, ornithological exhibits are placed not only in systematic sections, but also in ecological groups, where different birds can be seen in a “natural” setting. REPTILE COLLECTION

After amphibians, in the next showcases, there is a collection of reptiles, or reptiles.

Here you can see 70 species of turtles, 14 species of crocodiles, 9 species of amphisbaena, more than 170 species of lizards and a hundred species of snakes. As usual, at the end of the first display case there is a shield on which a brief description of the class of reptiles is given, the features of their structure are clearly shown, and their origin and evolution are told. COLLECTION OF MAMMALS

Mammals, or animals, are the evolutionarily youngest group of vertebrates.

Fossil remains of the oldest mammals are known from Jurassic deposits, however, by this time they were already quite numerous and had features of high specialization, which forces us to attribute the emergence of the group to an earlier period - the Triassic (about 220–230 million years ago). INVERTEBRATE ANIMALS COLLECTION

The name "Invertebrate Animals" was proposed in 1796 by the French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) as a general designation for insects and worms. In his classification, invertebrate animals were opposed to vertebrates - a group that united fish, reptiles, birds and mammals. A lot has changed since then. Many organisms were discovered and studied, the existence of which was not known at the time of Lamarck. The word “invertebrates” itself is now more of a common name than a scientific name, but it continues to be used. In the museum, one of the sections of the systematic collection appears under this general name.