The Arctic Paleontological Collections in the V.I. Vernadsky State Geological Museum (Moscow, Russia)

Abstract

The collection of the V.I. Vernadsky State Geological Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SGM RAS) is over 260 years old, and during this period it has constantly expanded. The first Arctic collections, mainly invertebrates, entered the museum in the middle of the twentieth century. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the type collections from the Russian Arctic began to be actively developed in the museum holdings. Arctic collections of the SGM RAS are represented mainly by Jurassic and Cretaceous cephalopods and bivalves, but also by some crinoids and several parts of ichthyosaur skeleton from the New Siberian Islands, Svalbard, Taimyr, northern Siberia, and Franz Josef Land.