About the Invertebrate Collection

Invertebrate collection: about our holdings

UCMP houses over five million fossil and Recent invertebrates, comprising mollusks, echinoderms, corals, graptolites, trilobites, brachiopods, fossil insects and other taxa from nearly 50,000 localities worldwide. More detailed information on the geographic and geologic coverage of the UCMP collections can be found in a series of tables arranged by geologic period. Major historical and reference collections include:

• A collection of over 15,000 type specimens, can be searched through the online catalog. Of particular note are material described by W.M. Gabb (1864); 195 specimens described by R.P. Whitfield and James Hall from the Paleozoic of the Mid-continent and the eastern United States; 68 mollusks from the Paris Basin Eocene; numerous ammonites from the Cretaceous of Texas and Mexico; about 200 insects in amber from the Chiapas region; Recent and fossil corals from the eastern Pacific and the Americas; and many cirrepedia, archaeocyathids and graptolites. The bulk of the collection is gastropods and pelecypods.
• Collections of the Second Geological Survey of California deposited by the State Legislature with the University in 1873.
• The Cloez Collection, a taxonomic collection of invertebrates from the Paris Basin Eocene.
• A comparative collection of over 500,000 Recent mollusks including modern extinct and endangered land mollusks from California. Much of the collection was acquired prior to 1925 and therefore is of historical value. The emphasis of the collection is on marine and non-marine mollusks of the eastern Pacific from Chile to northern Alaska and east to the continental divide.
• Recent scleractininan corals from the Pacific Basin and the Caribbean, especially the Pacific coast of the Americas.
• The USGS Menlo Park Collection, an extensive collection of Tertiary and Mesozoic fossils from USGS work in the Arctic and the western United States especially Alaska, California, Oregon and Washington.

For more information on these collections, contact the invertebrate collection manager.