Exhibition of the Museum of Permian Antiquities

About exhibition

The Museum of Permian Antiquities is a journey into the Earth's past, to the times of remarkable plants and mysterious animals studied by the science of paleontology. Most of them have vanished forever, leaving only traces in the planet's record: therapsids of the Permian period, dinosaurs of the Jurassic period, mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses of the Quaternary period, and many others that remain only in the paleontological record. In the Earth's chronicle there is a period identified in 1841 by the Scottish geologist Roderick Murchison and named after the Perm region — the 'Permian period', 'Perm'. This unique stage in the development of life on Earth lasted 50 million years. The ancient Permian sea, having retreated at the end of the Permian, left rich deposits of salts, gypsum and selenite. Samples of rocks and minerals can be seen in the geological section of the exhibition. In the museum halls, note the fossil grasshopper with the longest antennae in the world; Estemmenosuchus — the 'lizard with a crown on its head'; volkonskoite — petrified Permian wood used to produce mineral paint that Pablo Picasso particularly liked; the 'Permian mammoth', whose skeleton was discovered by children in 1927; the emerald-green garnet uvarovite; Permian reptiles unearthed in the Ocher District during the largest excavations in the history of Russian paleontology; and the Okhansk meteorite, which fell as a meteor shower near the village of Tabory in the Perm Governorate in 1887.