Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi

The Museum staff in botany works in taxonomy and systematics of the Amazon flora, ethnobotany and economic botany, plant biodiversity, structure and dynamics of rain forests. A botanical garden and several botanical collections are maintained, since the first one, established in 1895 by Jacques Huber, and it has more than 200,000 specimens of seeds, fruits, woods, pollen, histological sections and exsicata (dried and pressed specimens).

In zoology, the Museum does research on the Amazon fauna, its geographical distribution, behavior, ecology, taxonomy and systematics in mammalogy, ornithology, herpetology, ichthyology and entomology. The zoological collections include around 150,000 specimens of vertebrate whole bodies preserved in alcohol and taxidermy, skeletons, skins, eggs, anatomical parts, etc.; as well as more than 1 million specimens of invertebrates, including Arthropoda, Insecta and Mollusca.

In this area, there are research groups on the evolution of Amazon ecosystems, paleontology and paleoecology of tropical regions, sedimentology, mineralogy and stratigraphy, geology, geochemistry, paleogeology and pedology (the study of soils). The paleontological collections harbored by the Museum have more than 6,000 species, and the mineralogical collections more than 1,000 samples.

The existence of a rich pre-history and contemporaneous history of human populations in the Amazon have motivated, since the beginning of the Museum, a host of studies in archeology, anthropology, linguistics and ethnography. The institution is probably the largest repository of such Amazonic collections in the world, with more than 120,000 pieces in the archeological collection, including lithic and ceramic artifacts, and more than 14,000 pieces in the ethnographic collection, including indigenous cultures from Brazil, Africa, Peru and Suriname. The linguistics sector studies many aboriginal languages.